Does that sound like a familiar theme? My blogging lately has been very much on the back burner. As has my quilting which is why there have been no posts on Webs of Threads either. Just what have I been doing?
Genealogy. Have I mentioned that back around the early part of the year I purchased the Legacy 8 Deluxe genealogy software, and am re-entering everything manually as opposed to creating a Gedcom file and transferring the records? There were reasons for my madness, but it would take too long to explain, but trust me, re-doing manually is far better. It also gives me fresh eyes to review the content, and do further research in areas that need it, and there are many so it's going slowly. I can also verify and annotate my sources better.
One side of my family hails from Norway; from a little fishing village known as Helgeroa. Way back in the mid- to later 1800s, a few of them, independent of each other, left Norway. Some came here to the States, and others went to Australia. My grandfather wrote out a genealogy with short biographies of some of the older known ancestors, based on what he remembered his parents telling him, some very old photos he had, and by communication with descendant relatives in Norway and Australia of those earlier emigrants from Norway. The difficulty is that Grandpa didn't have the very specific connections of just who was connected to whom - in other words, who the common ancestor was that we're all connected to, nor do the contacts I have in Norway and Australia.
I feel strongly that I have the connecting family, but no solid sources to validate it. In the early 1800s, there was a man named Ola Anderson Bua and his wife Maria Elizabeth or Anne Marie (not sure which is accurate if either). They had children, obviously. It would seem at least three sisters and a brother if I'm correct.
My inherited records include photos of persons identified by name and as "cousin of Ole" or "... of C.N." No link to parent, so it wasn't known if they were cousins from their mothers' or fathers' sides. In a search at Ancestry, I located a researcher who has the exact picture of one individual...aha, at last, a little bit more of a connection through that researcher's wife's mother who was the niece of one of the pictured 'cousin'. I'm still not seeing "same names" in their tree though but the connection is there in the Ancestry DNA records - so we are related.
Norway used the patronymic naming system up until about 1923 when they were forced by law to choose a single family name, at which time they had the options of choosing a farm name instead. This all complicates research, which I can only do via the internet...in English! There are a few good sites with info, but compared to what I can access here in the states for state-side residents, it's minimal. Many names also had variant spellings depending on who wrote them down. In this one family the surnames went from Nilssen in Norway where he was the son of Nils, to Nilsen, then to Nelson, and his youngest brother opted to go with a farm name of Aske rather than Nilssen or its variants. It seems far too many males were Ole/Ola, Nils/Nels, Anders/Andreas, Martha/Marthea/Marta, Anne/Anna, Kisten/Kistine/Kirstine. Let's not forget the names with their special letters, Ærling, Øyvind, Åsmund. Ahhhh, such fun. Actually, it is, though often frustrating.
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