Friday, November 17, 2006

Some success in the 1865 Norway census

Blogging will be semi-light this weekend - my daughter and granddaughter are down to visit. I'd rather be with Lauren than blog - I'm sure you all understand.

Since I had such good luck in the Norway vital records, both in the IGI and VRI, in finding families for my friend's ancestors, I thought I'd try my luck in the 1865 census for Norway at http://digitalarkivet.uib.no . After some familiarization to using the search, I managed to find all four ancestral families that were in the census.

The search process is a bit different - you input first the given name and get results by county, then you input the patronymic family name and get fewer results by county, and then you can input the birth year (with a range if you want to) and get fewer results by county. Then you pick a county and get results by parish.

The neat thing is that if you don't get a hit with one person, you might succeed with the wife (since she has her own patronymic second name) or the kids, as long as you know an approximate birth date (from the IGI or VRI). The only problem I had was I input "Nielsen" for a patronymic got no hits in the location I thought he was living. So I backtracked and put in the wife's name and found it quickly - he was listed as Nilssen, not Nielsen.

I used this archive back in 1999, and the search process and output format have changed since then. I may do the 1800 census records also.

However, I think I have enough for my friend to chew over - he's going to be real surprised I think - the ahnentafel report is 24 pages for five generations. The real funny thing is that I can get his Norway families back to before 1800 using online records, but the three American families cannot be taken back before 1850 using online records with any certainty.

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