[#14207] Is there a standard method of reporting locations, genealogically?

[Gjest Arne Mikal Mikkelsen]

Hei Alle,Is there a standard way of reporting locations for geneological records for instance: 'farm,parish,county,country' and would sub parishes be included?. My fathers family lived for 250 years on the farm in Innjoa would it be recorded as 'Indbjoe,Fjelberg,Sondre Bergenhus, Norway' ?I have a family tree maker program on my computer and I want to standardize the way I report the locations that I put in the program.TakkArne Mikal

[Gjest Per Håkon Christiansen]

Your example seems to work just fine. The main goal must be to avoid ambiguities, because there are numerous farms with the same name, and many small, and even larger places with similar names, but in different counties or districts. So working upwards from the farmname - parish - county/district - country should work fine in this respect. But maybe somebody else can answer you original question whether there is something like an officially accepted standard for this?

[Gjest Bjarne Birkrem]

I can't say whether there's an official standard, but even if you include all those four levels of information (farm, parish, county, country), you may still run into difficulties. It is not uncommon to find more than one farm within the same parish bearing the same name. Usually those will be neighbouring farms which originally (going back to, say, the 1664 matricule) were one big farm, which was subsequently subdivided, e.g. between several sons of the original owner. In due course, one or more of those farms could then change owners, so that the families on two adjacent farms bearing the same name at any given time needn't be related. Sometimes our task is facilitated by epithets appended to the farm name (such as e.g. 'south X'/'north X', 'upper Y'/'lower Y' and so on), but this is by no means always the case.

[Gjest Arne Mikal Mikkelsen]

Thank you Per Håkon and Bjarne -- I realize that the bigger farms were sometimes split into bruk, but for my records, I think that 'farm,parish,county,country' will work ok. However, I have one other problem. I wonder if I should 'modernize' the names of the localities and farms, or use the names that were in effect when each person was living. Is there a standard way of reporting this?Helsing, Arne Mikal

[Gjest Per Håkon Christiansen]

Or farm name, parish, municipality, county (and country), which is the order used in O. Rygh: Norwegian Farms, to which you find a link here in DA (under useful links). With the complications which Bjarne Birkrem points to. -EIE is a generic term, a small cotter's farm OWNED by a larger farm (like Digremseie, you'll often find it written in short form like DigremsEj; it may sometimes be referred to under its specific name, especially at baptisms and vaccinations, sometimes with the generic term, and in some cases the particular name of the 'Husmannsplass' is lost. You have a problem with variations of farm names partly similar to the choice of spelling of first names: should it be normalized? But here the problem is also different in the sense that the name has developed throughout history, sometimes to such a degree that the original meaning of the name has got lost. F. ex Degrem in Enebakk: present name Degrum, Dygrem 1520 Deigrum 1594, Deigrom 1617, Degrumb 1666. In such cases I would have chosen to use the original form, than added: present name Degrum.