When “Fødested” Isn’t Just a Birthplace
One of the pleasures of Norwegian genealogy is discovering that a seemingly ordinary entry in Norwegian confirmation records can tell you considerably more than you first expected. Recently, while examining a confirmation register from Spydeberg, I noticed something odd in the column headed Fødested, or place of birth.
Several of the entries contained two place names separated by a dash.
At first, that looks like a simple description of where someone was born. But why would a minister write two different farms in a column specifically labeled Fødested?
The more examples I checked, the more convincing a theory became: the first place appears to be the person’s birthplace, while the second seem to identify the farm or locality where that person was living or attached at the time of confirmation.
This was not a universal rule. This particular minister seems to have used this method of recording information. But the evidence is becoming difficult to ignore.
Spydeberg prestekontor Kirkebøker, AV/SAO-A-10924/F/Fa/L0006: Kirkebok, 1863-1874, s. upaginert: https://goto.digitalarkivet.no/kb20060316030094
A young man called Hans
The first example that caught my attention was Hans Anthonsen, born 3 March 1860.
He was confirmed on 4 October 1874, when he was fourteen. In the confirmation register, the entry in the Fødested column reads:
Fossepl. – Hylli
That raised an immediate question. Was Hylli somehow part of his birthplace?
The answer appears to be no.
The family was living at a cotter’s place under Fossum, when Hans was born. The local history of Spydeberg also places Hans among the children born at a cotter’s place under Fossum which it names Laureng. By 1865 the family was still at Laureng. Interestingly, the local history book also states that nobody was living at Laureng at the census in 1875 (Juel et al., 2003, p. 906)
Hans’ birth:
Spydeberg prestekontor Kirkebøker, AV/SAO-A-10924/F/Fa/L0005: Kirkebok, 1842-1862, s. 106: https://goto.digitalarkivet.no/kb20060316040743
RA, 1865 census for Spydeberg, 1865, p. 19: https://www.digitalarkivet.no/ft20090716630127
Hylli, however, is a separate farm, about three kilometres away.
That distance is hardly remarkable in rural nineteenth-century Norway. A young person could easily move from one husmannsplass to another, or leave home to work on a farm. In fact, that is precisely the sort of movement we should expect among the rural population of the period.
The important clue is what happens next.
Hans is at Hylli in the 1874 confirmation record. By the 1875 census, the family has moved on, and Hans is found at Tasebakken, a cotter’s place under Lyshaug in neighbouring Hobøl parish.
RA, Census 1875 for 0138P Hobøl parish, 1875, s. 615: https://www.digitalarkivet.no/ft20110103320468
The sequence therefore looks like this:
Laureng/Fosseplass → Hylli → Tasebakken
The first place in the confirmation entry fits his birthplace. The second fits perfectly well as a place where he could have been living or working at the time of his confirmation, even though he had moved again before the 1875 census.
That distinction matters.
A census gives us a snapshot on a particular date. It does not tell us where someone lived a year earlier.
One more complication: Hans’s name
There is another small trap in Hans’s records, although it is not directly connected with the question of the two place names. In the 1875 census, his father is recorded as Johan Anthon Olsen, and Hans consequently appears as Hans Johansen. In his 1874 confirmation record, however, his father is recorded as Anthon Olsen, and Hans is Hans Anthonsen. To a researcher accustomed to fixed family surnames, this can look like two different families. They are not. The names reflect the old Norwegian patronymic system, in which the child’s second name was normally formed from the father’s given name. Thus a son of Johan would be Johansen, while a son of Anthon would be Anthonsen. Add a double given name such as Johan Anthon, and the result can become particularly confusing. Norwegian researchers therefore need to follow the whole family and the surrounding evidence rather than relying too heavily on a person’s patronym.
Aakeberg – Egeberg
The next example is even cleaner.
Immediately below Hans Anthonsen in the confirmation register is Peder Magnus Kristensen. His entry reads:
Aakeberg – Egeberg
The baptismal record establishes that Peder Magnus was born at Aakeberg.
Spydeberg prestekontor Kirkebøker, AV/SAO-A-10924/F/Fa/L0005: Kirkebok, 1842-1862, s. 103: https://goto.digitalarkivet.no/kb20060316040740
That gives us something important. We are no longer guessing that the first place in the two-part entry is the birthplace. We have an independent record showing that it is.
And Aakeberg and Egeberg are not two names for the same place. They are separate farms in Spydeberg —miles apart.
So once again we have the pattern:
Birthplace – another locality
The obvious question is whether Egeberg was where Peder Magnus was living or otherwise attached when he was confirmed. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find Peder Magnus or his family in the census for 1875.
If that can be established, we have another strong example of the same recording practice.
Nestingen – Giltvedt
The third example is particularly useful because it gives us a later census with which to compare the confirmation record.
Magnus Andersen, born 25 April 1859, is recorded in the confirmation register as:
Nestingen – Giltvedt
His baptismal record places the family at Nestingen when he was born.
Spydeberg prestekontor Kirkebøker, AV/SAO-A-10924/F/Fa/L0005: Kirkebok, 1842-1862, s. 99: https://goto.digitalarkivet.no/kb20060316040736
Then we come to the 1875 census.
Magnus is recorded as a farmhand at Giltvedt store.
RA, 1875 census for 0123P Spydeberg, 1875, p. 216: https://www.digitalarkivet.no/ft20110103400887
That is an unusually good fit.
The first place in the confirmation entry, Nestingen, is his birthplace. The second, Giltvedt, is where we subsequently find him working.
This does not prove that Magnus was living at Giltvedt on the exact day of his confirmation. But it makes the interpretation of the second place considerably more plausible.
It also illustrates why these movements can be difficult to reconstruct.
Magnus was a young man in a rural society where moving from one farm to another for work was entirely normal. A place named in a confirmation record may therefore disappear from the later census because the young person has moved again.
Husmanns did not necessarily stay put
This is an important part of the puzzle.
Many of the people appearing in these records came from husmann families. A husmann’s place was not necessarily a permanent family home in the way we tend to think about an address today.
Families could move between cotter’s places. Young men and women could leave home for service. A farmhand might live where he worked. A family might move a few kilometres down the road because another cotter’s place became available.
In that context, a notation such as:
Nestingen – Giltvedt
makes considerable sense.
The minister may have been giving us two pieces of information in a very economical form:
Born at Nestingen — now at Giltvedt.
That is not a formal definition of the notation, of course. It is my working interpretation based on the examples.
But it would explain something that otherwise looks rather peculiar.
You might want to read my article Who was the Husmann.
Why the dash matters
The dash is what first made me suspicious.
If the minister were simply giving additional information about the birthplace, we might expect something like:
Aakeberg, Spydeberg
or perhaps a farm followed by a parish.
Instead, we repeatedly see two distinct localities separated by a dash:
Fossepl. – Hylli
Aakeberg – Egeberg
Nestingen – Giltvedt
These are not simply alternative spellings of the same place.
They seems to represent movement between different farms or holdings.
And that is why I think the dash may be functioning almost like the word “now”:
birthplace – present locality
The minister had a column headed Fødested, so the first place answered the question asked by the heading. He then added another piece of information that was useful for identifying where the young person was currently situated.
Perhaps this was his own shorthand. Perhaps it was a local convention. Perhaps there is an instruction elsewhere in the register that explains it.
That last possibility is worth investigating.
Looking at no 11 Ole Andreassen, born August 14th 1859 we see that he is only listed with one place name: Tettem. His birth record confirms he was born at Tettem Spydeberg prestekontor Kirkebøker, AV/SAO-A-10924/F/Fa/L0005: Kirkebok, 1842-1862, s. 101: https://goto.digitalarkivet.no/kb20060316040738
The 1875 census tells us that Ole and the family still lives at Tettem/Tetteim
RA, 1875 census for 0123P Spydeberg, 1875, p. 537: https://www.digitalarkivet.no/ft20110104310115
The transcription problem
There is another lesson here, and it is one I have written about before.
Do not assume that a transcription is the same thing as the original record.
In the case of Magnus Andersen, the transcribed baptismal record contains an error in the address. The transcriber appears to have incorporated wording concerning his father’s occupation into the address field.
The original image tells us that the family was at Nestingen.
That matters because Nestingen becomes the first half of the confirmation entry:
Nestingen – Giltvedt
Had I relied solely on the transcription, the evidence would have been considerably harder to interpret.
This is not an attack on the people who transcribe these records. Reading nineteenth-century Norwegian handwriting is difficult, and transcription projects have made enormous quantities of material searchable. They are immensely useful.
But a transcription is an index to the source, not necessarily a replacement for the source.
When something doesn’t make sense, go back to the image.
I wrote about this problem in more detail in my earlier article A Word of Warning. It is a lesson I keep relearning in my own research.
A useful hypothesis, not yet a rule
At this point, I would not tell another researcher that every entry in every Norwegian confirmation register containing two places separated by a dash must mean birthplace and residence.
That would be going too far.
Parish registers were created by individual people, and ministers had their own habits. Formats changed. Instructions changed. Local practice varied.
What we have here is more modest and, I think, more useful.
In this particular Spydeberg confirmation register, there appears to be a pattern:
the first place appears to be the person’s birthplace, while the second seems to identify the farm or locality where that person was living, working, or otherwise attached at the time of confirmation.
The exact meaning of the second locality still needs to be tested.
That distinction is important. For a young farmhand, “residence” and “place of employment” could amount to much the same thing. For somebody staying temporarily with relatives, it might not.
The records themselves have to decide.
This is why following people through several records matters
The interesting thing about this discovery is that no single record proves the entire theory.
Hans gives us one piece of the puzzle.
Peder Magnus gives us another.
Magnus gives us another.
The census records, baptismal records, local history and confirmation register become useful because they can be compared against one another.
This is one of the things I enjoy most about Norwegian genealogy. The answer is often not sitting neatly in one database waiting to be found. You have to put several imperfect records beside each other and ask what story they tell together.
And sometimes the most useful clue is a tiny dash that everyone else has ignored.
Read the column, but read beyond the heading
The lesson here is not simply that we should interpret Fødested in a particular way. It is that we should pay attention to how an individual record keeper actually used a form.
A printed heading tells us what information the form was intended to contain. It does not necessarily tell us everything the person writing in it actually recorded.
In this case, the minister seems to have used the Fødested column to record both where a young person was born and where that person was currently living, working, or otherwise attached.
For genealogists, that is potentially valuable information.
A young person who appears to have vanished between two census years may not have vanished at all. He may simply have moved three kilometres down the road, taken work on another farm, and been recorded under a different locality.
The parish register may have quietly preserved that move for us.
All because the minister wrote a dash.
And that is why the original record is worth reading.
If you go to my download section you will find Cheat sheets showing the Norwegian church book headings.
References
Juel, E., Grøvle, Ø., & Skulberg, P. K. (Eds.). (2003). Midtbygda med stasjonsbyen (Vol. 2). Spydeberg bygdebokkomité.
