15 Nov 2024

In the past few weeks I have completely revised the Norwegian side of my family tree. I have many branches populated and am sourcing events using the fabulous resource of the Norwegian National Archives which has a huge number of scans of church books freely available online. They are, of course, in Norwegian which makes for slow going when searching through the records but its very rewarding when finding a baptism record that includes the parents dates and places of birth.

One problem that all Norwegian genealogists face is how to record names. Historically Norway did not use inherited surnames. Instead a person would be known by their given name and patronymic name, such as Olaf Hansen being the son of Hans. This was qualified by the name of their farm. Farms were a formal part of the Norwegian administrative system which is not surprising given 99% of the people were farmers (loosely speaking). There are formal catalogues of farm names including the nineteen volume Norske Gaardnavne which can be used as a standard reference. However the farm name associated with a person can change over time if they move to a new location.

Norway did adopt formal hereditary surnames by law in 1923 although many people were already using them some years before including my own Hvaal ancestors.

There are conflicting conventions for recording Norwegian names. FamilySearch recommends only using the patronym and WikiTree recently converted to this convention too. However the influential Norway DNA project recommends including the farm name as part of the person’s full name.

I’ve chosen to take a hybrid approach using Gramps’ support for multiple names. I use the given name and patronym as the primary name for each person, on the principle that this is unchanging over their lifetime. It has the side-effect that men and women have different last names (a suffix of -sen vs -datter). I then add alternate names for every farm name I discover for them, tagging each component of their name as “patronymic” or “location” as appropriate (another useful feature on Gramps). I link citations to each variation of the name.

I do something similar on Ancestry but without the tagging support.

So Ellen Maria Sørensdatter will also have an alternate name of Ellen Maria Sørensdatter Rønneberg to include the name she was known by when married.