All 15,000 to 18,000 people of it.
A tree is a database, and databases that have had bad info input and then erased (learning curve) have problems. So — I started over. OMG. I got 10 generations on with practically everybody—and discovered the program hadn’t been recording it.
Blooie. I had dumped it, think it was autosaved, but stupid me—I’d had the program open in another window, mostly forgotten, and it had right of way. It didn’t record.
Lost it.
I’m doing it all over again. This time down the main family line. 40 gen, and I’ve hit Vikings. Bigtime Vikings.I have Vikings all over my tree. You would not believe how many. My English tree has Vikings. My Dutch tree has Vikings, I foreknow that, and that’s my mother’s tree: I’m still working on my father’s. The Norwegians, Danes, and Swedes really kept records, all the way to frost giants, to whom I am of course related (I love it when we get to mythology). And if it weren’t for idiots in the DB saying they lived in New Jersey in 2007 we’d be happier—and then there are the people that haven’t noticed the -sdottir/-sdotter/-sson business, and give us Queen Cyrid Bjornsson instead of Bjornsdotter. Gettaclue! It’s so easy to follow a Nordic genealogy: you KNOW if they were Bjornsdotter, their dad was named, yes, Bjorn. And since they recycle names in alternate generations—it gives you a help in kicking the DB to see what it might turn up, if prodded (it’s interactive with the World Tree)… Dutch names, too, except (Hanneke will understand, I think) that, beyond going from Pieter Jans to Jan Pieters….start going in genealogical circles…I had one that looped three times before I began to understand somebody had started reiterating the prior sequence, loop-to-loop-to loop, and I had followed it much too far without checking the dates.
I SO enjoyed my stint as GOH in Oslo…I was amazed that everyone spoke English; and I was already so curious—I think my appointed convention guide thought I was nuts: I wanted to see every museum; I had no idea about the Sculpture Park (Vigelund), but I was fascinated—and I wanted to see ordinary life. In Oslo, if you don’t have bus fare, and you’re a regular, you just tell the driver you’ll pay tomorrow. Brilliant! Shiny! And I was so embarrassed to realize if I’d been hit by said bus while I was there, the Norwegian health care system would handle everything—I was so embarrassed I didn’t want to reclaim my VAT (value added tax) at my exit from the country. I could get behind that. I’d have given them a donation. I’ve never felt so indebted. And of course the people were wonderful. Did I mention I missed my flight to Oslo? An airport guard steered me wrong, I missed my plane, my luggage ended up in Oslo and I finally got a plane to Geneva, which was full of blue-bereted UN forces going somewhere. I then nabbed an Lufthansa flight (I wasn’t personally paying for this: I was the airline’s problem, thank goodness, because it was Atlanta’s fault!) over the edge of Germany, which I’d never seen, up over Denmark—screw the distractions in the cabin: I was looking out the window!—and on across to Norway. It was so good. I loved my stay there, in every regard.
Anyway—-back to the ancestry thing….If I’d been doing that, then—I’d have wanted to see Vestfold and Telemark, and more museums. IT’s so fascinating. And then there was the WWII museum—in which they had hollowed out logs in which the Resistance had smuggled stuff inside loads of wood, which was just brilliant….
I so loved my visit there.
If anybody wants to play this game, ancestry.com always runs a 2-weeks-free offer…and it’s kinda fun: what you need is the best info you can get from grans and family Bibles, and a week in which you can live on potato chips and liter bottles of Coke. It’s intuitive, and in 2 weeks without sleep you can run down everything easy to extract from the World Tree…then bail off, reconstruct, and figure if you want to carry on with it.
Are you sure you don’t mean Bjørnsdatter? 🙂 (My great-great-grandmother was Jonetta Bjørnsdatter.) The Norwegian records aren’t quite as meticulous as the Swedish records (annual visits from the pastor to determine Lutheran catechism retention as well as names of everyone in the house and when they moved in or out are great), but Norway presents them free for all to explore online. I’m not sure if I need to know the name of the person who administered smallpox vaccinations to my ancestors, but I do have that fact now.
Have fun reorganizing your data. That’s my project for another day.
You’re right, of course. I get confused because some are -dottir and others -datter —I think one may be Icelandic, or old, or, who knows? just wrong. 😉 I’m not certain of anything in those lines: my Swedish/Norwegian roots are quite far back, so I have, outside of my friend John Dalmas (who is a sweetheart, if you’ve never met him) I have no ready check on pronunciation OR spelling; and what comes in from the World Tree via internet connectivity is, well, if the 2nd Lord Salisbury is resident in De Kalb, Georgia in 1612, or better yet, Richard Sans Peur was in New York…
I’m barely 100 years away from the farms of Sweden and Norway. The only branch that “bettered” itself was a Swedish farmboy turned baker in the early 19th century. Lots of -dottors in Sweden and -datters in Norway until you go back far enough (1500s, I think), when the crown wanted northern Sweden populated. My guess is knighthood was the carrot on the end of that stick stuck in the ground near Lapland.
It’s a fascinating hobby.
To be precise it is “-dotter” in Swedish. Pretty unusual nowadays.
Not all surnames was like that, though. Many was named after were they lived or what they did. And then there’s the soldier names, like Stark (strong) and Hård (hard) and suchlike. These live on.
Also, many Swedes, and our emigré relatives, have Dutch ancestry, from back when we imported Dutch weapon smiths (17th century).
Main reason for the good recordskeeping is tithe and wars: you need to keep tabs on your serfs if you want to maximise exploitation.
Yes, I am serious – why do you think so many wanted to emigrate? 😉
Gah! Managed to mangle my post! What got left out was – Dutch immigrants often took a made-up name, and thus can be a bit hard (impossible?) to trace.
I have an ancestor named Maria Hoogeboom, which I gather to be one of those non-place names. Schenks, van Odycks, van Kouwenhovens, Hendricks, and Hermans, as well as the van Deventers who became Vandeventers. It’s not all of them, because they sort of scattered: some went into New Jersey, on a river, some into New Amsterdam—wish I had the land where the van Deventers once had their home: I think it’s now mid-downtown Manhattan.
Hoogeboom = Hightree, not a placename.
Schenk = a famous long-distance scater born in 1944 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ard_Schenk). 😉
Odijk = the small village next to my parents’ hometown, and part of the same community. The -ck spelling instead of -k is oldfashioned, it mostly disappeared I think at the spelling simplification last century. It’s located near the center of the province Utrecht, just to the east of the city Utrecht, which is in the middle of the Netherlands. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odijk
Hendrik (-> Henry) and Herman are usual first names for men. An -s or -sz at the end was originally short for ‘son of’, but became an integral part of the fixed family name from the point when last names were officially recorded. That was during the French occupation in the early 1800’s, when Napoleon’s little brother Louis was king of the Netherlands and organised a national civil administration and several important basic national laws.
My sis-in-law has Norwegians (emigrated in the 1890s, ended up in Canada), and there are Swedes on mine, so I’ve been dealing with the names for a while. I decided the easiest way to handle the feminine names was to abbreviate it ending to ‘dtr’.
Now I’m dealing with her stepfather’s family, which is three-fourths Irish and one-fourth (the one with the name) Quebecois.
I would caution to be careful about spelling, particularly once you’re here in America and back in Europe from the 18th century backwards.
My last name gets misspelled *now* some twenty or more ways, and mispronounced around four usual ways. My family name is unusual, but it’s only *one letter* different from a very common last name, and only one *additional* letter from an even more common name. The pattern throws people. It isn’t what they expect. When someone pronounces it right, I compliment them. LOL, but even then, they may later forget and switch! (It’s so common, it doesn’t bother me, I expect it. And it could be good, in some ways.)
So -dotter, -datter, -dottir could all be misspellings or guesses, if the person recording doesn’t guess right, reads it wrong, doesn’t find out from the source, or if both the recording clerk and the person whose name it is, are not good at spelling. If the named person couldn’t read and write, it was up to the clerk to guess. Clerks would, even in the 20th century, change spellings of immigrants’ names, sometimes even if the immigrant was perfectly literate. (That didn’t entirely preclude that immigrant from using his/her name properly anyway. …Or changing it, if there was reason to desire a certain degree of freedom from, ah, official entanglements.)
As a simple case in point, within my family tree, there are several cases where what are clearly the same family and sometimes the same person, are recorded, Kopenhauer, Kopenhaver (old formal Latin usage, 1800’s, on a tombstone), with C instead of K, and the same for Katherine or Catherine, with THER and THR both. I don’t recall if there was also T for TH, but if so, it would mean she (and possibly her parents) were Americanized instead of Old World immigrants. I take it, though, that these folks were already fully American. Mary, fortunately, didn’t have trouble with her name. There’s also Hobbes and Hobbs in another branch.
The Kopenhauers and Hobbs were both women marrying into my family name, and because it was local and the families were neighbors and friends, you find cases where a brother from one family married a sister from another, while another sister married a brother or cousin in the other family, or someone from the other family married into theirs. This meant close ties, intermarriage, the two families merging, in effect, but obviously not inbreeding. There were plenty of eligible catches in the county!
As an indicator: My paternal grandpa was the kind who had a good memory and knew people all over the county and other counties besides. He was a small town farmer, and probably never made it all through high school. But in his day, it was a one-room schoolhouse and no such thing as high schools, likely, anyway. Nevertheless, he was well read, better educated, and people came to him for advice on contracts, for surveying, and so on. (He and my grandma made sure all their kids read and wrote and did basic math before starting school. All but one attended college and graduated.)
So my dad grew up helping grandpa, and my dad’s memory for names, places, and so on was good too. My grandpa therefore could go up to nearly anyone in the adjoining two or three counties and know who they were, their family and some history, something about the land, and so on, and they could trade, either barter or cash. That part of the country is generally poor (near Cumberland Gap) but the people are hardy and smart.
The point? People back then (late 1800’s and backwards, on up to the present) could and did travel within the county, from their farms and towns to the county seat and to neighboring farms and towns in the surrounding counties. Neighboring farmers around a town all knew each other. That was who there was to raise a barn, help with canning and butchering, help when babies came, get your grain milled and your lumber milled, and who was available for marriage for you and your children. People in nearby towns and the county seat were who bought what you produced and who you bought from when you needed supplies and goods and new livestock.
I learned my way, mostly, around the old county records on trips my mom and dad made back there (we lived in Texas, not Virginia) in order to do genealogy research. So between that and language skill and interest in calligraphy and type, I can usually make out the old handwritten county clerks’ documents, including if there was a signature and seal by the clerk or by the ancestor or neighbor. — When I last went with my dad, before he passed away, the county, being small and overworked, was lucky to have current records on computer. Nothing from prior to about the 1980’s or 1990’s was on computer, even as a scanned image, let alone text.
Not to argue over trivia, but the different spellings are founded on different pronunciations and at least in Sweden most if not all people could read and spell, if not write fluently – it was stipulated by a 1685 law that the local vicar had to teach the local children to read – the goal was that a child should be able to read a book by age 10.
When school became compulsory in 1842 to just added more topics to the curriculum 😉
Of course, spelling is only part of it. Naming conventions and unified spelling is, as I know that you know, pretty recent and people felt and were free to spell however they wanted (I have enough evidence of this in my own family tree). Changing a name was not a big thing and on arriving in a new land it was often done to better melt into the new culture. An example is Joe Hill, a protest singer who (it is said) came to inspire Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, among others; he came to the US in 1902 and was born as Joel Häggström.
Like for so many others changing a name had more to do with fitting in than with evasion of the law. The same is seen in Sweden today when many people born with names obviously “not from here” often change at least their family name to sound more native, so to have an easier road to a job.
I don’t condone either that or the politics that has led to it being forced upon them, but this is the way it is.
Yes, exactly. Those differing pronunciations, and people who wrote it “how it sounded” or “how it looks right” do come up with a fair number of variations, which can get tricky.
I seem to be lucky in that most of my ancestors, once over in the New World, were literate.
I agree, most often, if an immigrant changes his or her name, or lets other people’s spelling or pronunciation stand, it’s most often about trying to fit in or accept how things are in the newly adopted country.
One high school friend went by the name Bobbie, because she said too many people had trouble getting her real given name right. Her real given name wasn’t too hard: Rajshree. 🙂
Another friend was Chinese, fresh off the boat from Taiwan when he arrived at our junior high. Like many Chinese people, he took an American given name to make it easier (and so his Chinese name wouldn’t be mispronounced so badly). So he became York instead of Yung-Hsing. The significance of “York” in English history didn’t have any bearing on it. It was, I guess, a name that “sounded good.”
Dottir is Icelandic – I had a couple of Icelandic friends in grad school – both were -dottirs, it is still in modern useage which apparently makes the phone book a bit of a challenge at times.
Also -OT- read a nice review of Intruder in the new LOcus, also noted in their ‘New and Notable’ page.
Check your local library. Ours offers access to ancestry.com with the only limitation being that you must be inside the library to use it (no login from home, sorry). All you need is a library card.
That is a project I will need to do, but am putting off for now. I had hit a wall trying to determine which of the many John Reeds in an area was the father of an ancestor. I started adding every Reed in that town and tracing up and down generations looking for connections. I eventually found my ancestor, but added maybe 100s of people with no known connection to my database.
Yep, that’s the situation our tree got into. They’re kind of sticky—once you get them it doesn’t like to let you erase them, and if you try, you’re apt to hit the wrong one!
Gotta love those naming conventions when the family has multiple children… within a few generations half the villiage sons are named Johanne Jacob Lastname. The other half are either Johanne Sumthinstumtin or Jacob Whatshisname. I’ve been busy tracing what I am sure are cousins of some degree through . Thank goodness the female line is a little (JUST a little) more variable! The twist I’ve run into lately is that they must have lived half way between two villages, and registered in BOTH… 😐
I’d love to get things organized. A friend talked me into using Family Tree, so I downloaded my Ancestry file and got it zipped back quite a ways and cleaned it up nicely which was much eaasier than in Ancestry. But I kinda liked how Ancestry would let me link Ancestry (maybe I just haven’t figured out how to do it on Family Tree). Is there a way I can upload the Family Tree file back to Ancestry?
Mmm. There is an ‘import’. If you’ve got a ged.com file, I think highly doable. It depends on format. Tulrose, have you any idea? I’ve never tried an import from another software.
If you’re using Ancestry’s own Family Tree Maker software, there’s a button inside that software, and they’re very anxious to have you upload it…on the newest version (Family Tree Maker 2012) you have to get past that screen pleading with you to link in every time you boot the program.
If you can’t get it to upload, they’ll tell you how to do it via a third-party site – you upload it to there, send Ancestry’s tech people the link, and they move it from there. (I’ve had trouble, yes.)
Ancestry accepts GEDCom’s as an import. There’s a 75MB size limitation on GED imports. Not all GED’s are created equal, however.
Re spellings—I like to keep the name in my tree spelled as it was when the person was alive. You find Hawise, Avice, Alice—and there are some folk who want to convert them all to Alice, which sort of like calling Charlemagne Big Charlie, in my book. So I have Roheses (roses),Avices (Alices) and Eudeses (Odo) and Jeans (John in English), Gautier (Walter), Fulk and Foulques depending on nationality. One of the other challenges is pronunciation of names from around the Norman invasion: de Bohun is de Boone and de Braose seems to be de Bracy, de Brus is de Bruce. I don’t think understanding either French or English would help you follow one of William the Conqueror’s (Guillaume’s) speeches as he gave it.
I agree about keeping the names as the person spelled it when alive, but it sure can be challenging. I once spent several hours trying to figure out where my ancestors had run off to because the census index (soundex strikes again) wasn’t showing ANY “Strickland” families. I’d already searched the common variations (stricklin, stricklan) with no luck. Now, this was a rather large family with many branches in that county, so I finally resorted to randomly pulling up a transcript and searching, only to find the original census taker had mangled an entire county’s worth of ‘Strickland’s into ‘Strickling’s. Sigh.
More recently (er, farther in the past?) I’ve been glad of name variations, because apparently some one of my ancestors decided to spell the last name ‘Hartmus’ instead of ‘Hartmas’. I’ve seen variations, -us, -uss, that funky german double ss that looks like a B, and in a few cases -ussen, but never the A that seems to be common in other areas of Germany. Now if only they’d had another GIVEN name, besides Johanne Jacob.
@ Hanneke, I forgot to say, among the variations on family name were:
Kopenhauer, Kopenhaver, but not Kopenhauen, Kopenhaven. C instead of K occurred too.
I’d asked another Nederlander as well as German speakers about the name meaning or place, and he gave a few guesses. I gather there are a few possibilities. I’d be interested, for the sake of curiosity, or for actual clues, either one. — The Kopenhauer/Kopenhaver family were aunts and grandmothers, back a few generations in my family tree. Both families were close enough there were I think three couples who married, two generations, if I recall.
@ C.J. — Would there happen to be a copy of one of Guillaume le Conquisant’s speeches in Norman French written somewhere online? Very curious what I’d make of Middle French.
For genealogy researchers: Once you get back near Middle English times, even into the early Modern period, English vowels went into several “flavors” before and during the Great Vowel Shift. So O, OA, OO, OU; or U, OU; or E, EA, EE, EI/EY; all happen, and from the Old English into the Middle English period, you have A and AE changing to A, O/OA, E/EA; or Y (an u-umlaut sound) into U, OU, or I, Y. If you run into the rare QUH like in Farquhar, it is because the Norman French scribes were trying to spell the Saxon HW- that became standardized as WH-. -H became -GH. — The point: If you’re back in Middle English or early Modern English, you may see O and OO for the same long, close OH sound, E and EE for the long, close AY sound, before they went to OH, OOH, EE.
(Moore and Muir and Brooch and Blood, Flood are…yet more variants. Add to that, apparently for a while there, the Middle English/Norman scribes liked to write U more than O in certain positions, because they thought it “looked better,” more visually pleasing. Wacky fun!)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2071447/Race-time-record-language-spoken-William-Conqueror-dies-out.html
Oh! What an article! I’ve bookmarked it. I listened twice to the audio clip and found I could make out parts of it, and should be able to make out more, with a few more tries. Huh, what a strange mix of English and French pronunciation and, from what I could tell, grammar and lexicon, from standard French. The English vs. French CH and J seems to be iffy there, and there’s an English/American style R instead of the French R.
Comme c’est formidable d’essaier en challengeant la pièce.
Huh, the article didn’t mention the Norman French term, “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!” for “Hear ye! Hear ye! Hear ye!” which is still used in some instances in English courts and at least one instance in American courts. But it’s given a Middle English / Anglo-Norman pronunciation, “oy-yay” instead of “wah-yay.”