Tag Archive | Norwegian

Norwegian Pancakes for Christmas

Dec26

This blog was intended to be a personal blog with many gardening, cooking, and genealogy posts. However after I tested my DNA and talked other family members into doing it too, I found that they needed explanations of how to do things at blogcategoriesthe various DNA companies. Unlike me they were not willing to spend hours and hours experimenting, so I added a number of tutorials for my cousins which are linked to from the top menu here under DNA testing as well as from under Resources. Soon I found myself writing more about DNA: tips, techniques, and success stories. Thus this blog morphed into being mainly about genetic genealogy. The numbers for each category shown on the left tell the story.

So enough DNA for now. To me the holidays are about love, family, friends, and food. Happy Holidays to all of you. Now for some food …

My late father always made us “Norwegies,” the family nickname for Norwegian pancakes, on Christmas morning as well as on many other special occasions. So guess what I cooked on Christmas morning for my jewish husband. No I will not make them on every day of Hannukah! Yes he did say that they were just like blintzes.

norweegiesWe stuffed them with strawberry jam and then sprinkled them with confectioner’s sugar. Click here for the family recipe in a previous year’s holiday food post (towards the end).

My New Year’s resolution is to write more food and garden posts, maybe as often as once a month, in addition to the usual weekly DNA post and the occasional genealogy post.

More on Norwegian naming practices and how to list them in your GEDCOM

May19

On GENI.com and wikitree.com they allow birth surnames for men and women which makes life easier for those of us with Norwegian ancestry since the farm name of birth can go into the “maiden” name slot for both sexes and the farm where they lived most of their life into the surname slot. It is important to use the farm name as a surname and put the patronymic in as a middle name, since it makes it much easier to find and identify an ancestor. There are so many Ole Olesons and Lars Larsons otherwise.

ArvegodsThis wonderful blog post explains Norwegian naming in great detail.

http://arvegods.blogspot.com/2012/02/norwegian-names.html

Sadly she has not written very many blog posts.

[UPDATE 9-AUG-2017] That author, Anne Berge, told me to send people to this page instead for her Norwegian DNA project at Family Tree DNA:
http://www.norwaydna.no/gedcoms-and-genealogy/norwegian-names-en/norwegian-names-in-genealogy-software-en/
[END UPDATE]

I found the original on this page at GENI which discusses Norwegian ancestry in detail.

http://www.geni.com/projects/Norwegian-Ancestry-information/11383

 

Translating Farm Books Using a Norwegian OCR program

Apr22

NorwegianOCR
When I scan in documents I use a product called PaperPort for my Optical Character Reader (OCR – turns images of words into text that can be edited in a word processor) but it does not know about Norwegian characters.  So it has been a lot of work for me to clean up the result of a Norwegian scan in order to use Google Translate on it. Needless to say, I was delighted to read that there is an online OCR program for Norwegian!   Jim Bergquist, a fellow subscriber to the rootsweb Norway list, posted the step by step process to that group for translating farm book entries using this tool and he has given me permission to rephrase his method on this blog. Here it is:

  1. Crop the text part of your scanned image and save as a separate image file. Make sure to do a multi-column pages one column at a time.
  2. Go to http://www.i2ocr.com/free-online-norwegian-ocr . This is an online Optical Character Recognition tool. You don’t have to download or install any software.
  3. Instructions at the bottom tell you to:
    1. Click the “File” radio button. Press “Select Image”. Use the file box to navigater to where you put the image on your computer.
    2. Leave the language in Norwegian.
    3. Enter the two numbers or words separated by a space. These are used to prevent automated robots from using the site for hours.
    4. Press “Extract Text.”
  4. Three buttons will appear at the bottom of the screen and the extracted text will be in the left hand box (see example below).
    • Download, to put it on your own computer (a good choice).
    • Translate, I haven’t used – it may send it as-is to Google Translate. However, OCR usually requires some corrections to be made, so you should look at the result and correct it before trying to translate.
    • Edit in Google Docs, if you are familiar with working on documents in the cloud.
    • Of course you can just cut and paste the text in the left hand box over to your word processor instead of any of the above options, which is what I did.
  5. When you have corrected any OCR errors in the file, select the text and paste it into Google Translate.

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Reading Norwegian Churchbooks

May30

My cousin Dick Larkin has put together a wonderful guide to reading Norwegian churchbooks which is now available in our downloads section. It includes many charts, urls, and images of handwriting. Since so many Norwegian records are online at http://arkivverket.no/eng/content/view/full/629 – this is great help in doing genealogical research. While the census records there are transcribed to typewritten entries and easy to use, the church records require pouring through the images of handwritten entries so help or skill is needed to interpret them.

Here are a few excerpts from his guide:

“If you have chosen your parents wisely, your genealogical research will include Norwegian records.  Norway has one of the most readily accessible bodies of genealogical data of any country outside the United States; the ‘Kirkeboker’, or churchbooks, are an important part of those data.  They are the primary repository of data on births, marriages, and deaths for roughly the period 1670 to 1930, and, best of all, they are online and accessible without cost. Their only real downside is that they can be a challenge to read. This paper will help you overcome that challenge.

and how to figure out which churchbook:
“There are three ways to start: – First and best is to scour your own family records, certificates, Bibles, letters, diaries, and the like, and to inquire of elderly living relatives for clues as to where in Norway your ancestors came from. – Second is to look on Rootsweb (www.rootsweb.ancestry.com) to see if someone else has been researching your family and has posted their family tree data there. – Third is to use theFamilySearch website, but this may or may not be very helpful without at least some other clues. For example, this search lists over 137,000 people named Ole Olsen born in Norway between 1650 and 1930. Two ways to narrow this search are first by date of birth (or other known or closely estimated date); second is by location – at least at the county level. But even narrowing the search to Vest Agder County, and birth years 1800 to 1830 still gives 692 Ole Olsens. Death records in the United States sometimes identify a birth location in Norway; a farm name may give a clue (but a given farm name will likely be found in multiple communities and counties).
 [Editor’s note  when your ancestors names do not end in -sen or -son they have probably taken their farm name as their surname in this country for example Sande, Hauge, Skjold, and Tveit are all farm names. The familysearch listings for specific counties usually give a list of farm names but these may not be complete so try googling for the farm name with the words farm and norway. For example, googling for “tveit farm norway” turns up farms in at least four different counties.]

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It’s a Match!! Lars Monsen’s ancestors are found.

May10

The direct male line descendant of Ole Monsen Titland  (1702-1764) is a Y-chromosome DNA 34/37 match to my Dad, who we thought was also a descendant of Ole. Now we know he is!

Thank you so much cousin Sigmund for finding a distant cousin in direct paternal descent to test.

This story was written up a few months back in a post here but we were waiting on the DNA Y-chromosome STR test to prove our theory. Now it is proven.

Here are the deeper details of the three markers that do not match:

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