andcuriouser
Active Member
My sister is doing my family's for some reason, and she's actually traced us back really far, but then she's hitting some problems.
Like, my family name "Sondresen", is a patronymic, but the actual practice of patronymics died out in the early 1900s. She's traced back before that (which was hell--our last name has been spelled Sondresen, Sondresson, Sondreson, Sondresøn, etc.), but now she's hitting worse problems.
There was an Ole Sondresson, and his father was Sondre Oleson. Which is great, but then there are so many damn Oles and Sondres and a million other names and every one has some weird spelling variant, and North American keyboards hate Norwegian characters. And there's some random girl we've found, a Gunhild Johandatter, who is somehow related to us, but the connection is really vague, and we're not quite sure who's daughter she is, since there's four Johan's in our family in that generation.
Anyway, that was probably really boring. But my point is, my sister has assigned me the task of translating random documents (which is a sort of bad idea, since my Norwegian is pretty bad... not as bad as hers, but still pretty bad), and it's really boring.
Have any of you done genealogies, and do you have any tips? Genealogy stories? Interesting family stories? Whatever? I'd love to hear them. Ancestors are fascinating.
Like, my family name "Sondresen", is a patronymic, but the actual practice of patronymics died out in the early 1900s. She's traced back before that (which was hell--our last name has been spelled Sondresen, Sondresson, Sondreson, Sondresøn, etc.), but now she's hitting worse problems.
There was an Ole Sondresson, and his father was Sondre Oleson. Which is great, but then there are so many damn Oles and Sondres and a million other names and every one has some weird spelling variant, and North American keyboards hate Norwegian characters. And there's some random girl we've found, a Gunhild Johandatter, who is somehow related to us, but the connection is really vague, and we're not quite sure who's daughter she is, since there's four Johan's in our family in that generation.
Anyway, that was probably really boring. But my point is, my sister has assigned me the task of translating random documents (which is a sort of bad idea, since my Norwegian is pretty bad... not as bad as hers, but still pretty bad), and it's really boring.
Have any of you done genealogies, and do you have any tips? Genealogy stories? Interesting family stories? Whatever? I'd love to hear them. Ancestors are fascinating.
) so... not an exactly proud of family, but proud nonetheless.
