How to track farm names?

[Lucas Woods]

How do you all keep track of the farm names during geneology research? There is a notes section on Ancestry i could place them into? and would be able to put the dates that they lived at "X" place then moved to "X" farm.

Just wondering how you all keep track of it, especially if a family or person moved multiple times.

 

Hvordan holder dere alle rede på gårdsnavnene under genologiforskning? Det er en merknadsdel om Ancestry jeg kunne plassere dem i? og ville være i stand til å legge datoene de bodde på "X" sted og deretter flyttet til "X" gård.

Bare lurer på hvordan dere alle holder rede på det, spesielt hvis en familie eller person flyttet flere ganger.

[Karianne Fog Heen]

On my part, there are several "bygdebøker", village books, written that keeps track of exactly this. I use www.nb.no (national library) to search for names of people and farms. Many village books will list farms, tell about who sold and bought when, farms that were split etc. This is mostly about the owners though, even if I do have a few books that also mention "husmenn", tenant workers. They are harder to track as they moved often, and often changed their names after what farms they lived on.

 

As for tree building, I generally mention where they lived at each census. So * Census 1900 living at Farmfield with wife and 3 children. * Census 1910 living at countryfarm with two youngest children, etc.

[Anton Hagelee]

Yes Lucas, the farm name does complicate maintaining a Family Tree. There probably is no right or wrong way to do it but there is a need to try to be  consistent. I have a Family Tree on Ancestry.com and have always tried to keep a farm name with the person in the tree. However this approach does often force me to chose a farm name for the Tree from a list of names associated with the person, since as you are aware the farm can change as a person ages and moves from the farm to farm.  For some I have chosen the farm name where they were born as I did with my great, great grandfather even tho he probably only lived there briefly. He then was associated with several other farms for a few years until he finally settled down and leased a bit of land associated with a larger farm. {Called a husmannsplass in Norwegian}. By that time he was married and had two children. He lived there, had four more children and died there. In the information  I have found for him in the parish records he is referred to by several farm names. So for him I had at least three or four farm names to chose from. I decided for no really good reason to use the farm name where the person was born if I could determine that farm name. For his son Olav I actually had two choices for name of farm where he was born. The leased bit of land that housed the family had a name Støylsjordet, but so did the larger farm upon which the leased farm sat. It was called Høgeli. In the records for Olav he is sometimes listed under the name of the husmannsplass and sometimes under the name of the main farm. I chose to list him under the farm name of the larger farm. I chose that name as it seemed to me to best define where he was from. But it was only a choice and I would be comfortable with either way. 

 

As I got further back in time, I knew less about the person and tended to chose a farm name based on where he spent most of his life. That was usually based on information from the  "Farm Books", bygedbøker in Norwegian. 

 

However other people can chose farm names that are different for the same person. You will run into that when and if you start to look at internet based family trees such as Geni.com. That just means that they used a different criteria for choosing the farm name. But it does make it a little more difficult to both find ancestors and determine if they really are the same people. 

 

 

 

 

 

[Lucas Woods]

thank you both for this breakdown. Since i am new to the norwegian/scandanavian contry naming, i wanted to get the perspective of some people who have been tracking this for much longer than i have and see what their "best practices" were. I appreciate the info and the lesson very much.