RLP 286: Researching your Scandinavian Ancestors with Torhild Shirley Part 2

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 286, researching your Scandinavian Ancestors with Torhild Shirley Part two, Welcome to Research Like, a Pro a genealogy podcast about taking your research to the next level. Hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder Accredited genealogist Professional Diana and Nicole are the mother daughter team at family Locket dot com and the authors of Research Like, a pro A Genealogist guide with Robin Wirthlin. They also co-authored the Companion volume, Research Like a Pro with DNA, join Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research and solve difficult cases.

Nicole (41s):
Let’s go the sponsor of today’s episode of Research Like a Pro is newspapers.com, the largest online newspaper archive. Hi everyone and Happy New Year Welcome to Research. Like a Pro.

Diana (56s):
Hi. Nicole, how are you today?

Nicole (59s):
I’m great How about you. What have you been doing?

Diana (1m 2s):
Well when we are recording this because it’s earlier than New Year’s Day, I have been reviewing a lot of client reports, so that’s been really fun to look at some client work that we have been doing in different areas by our research team. There was one in New York that was really based on DNA that was super fascinating and then one in Virginia And, that one didn’t have DNA but it was separating many, many men of the same name, which was fun. And then the other project was again set in the south. This one was in Georgia. And so I always enjoy reading the reports and seeing what we’ve been able to Discover.

Diana (1m 46s):
So How about you. What have you been working on?

Nicole (1m 49s):
Well the last month I’ve been doing a lot of working on the Airtable template for the DNA study group and trying to update that and make it the best that it can be. And the main thing I’ve been working on is coming up with a better system for using views for the timeline and the research log and just consolidating where you put the sources, just all the sources and the research log and then linking that to the timeline table so that you only have one place with all the sources and citations and then you can have a lookup field for the timeline for the citations for each event and the source that it comes from. And then, you know, we used to differentiate how you would have what you knew at the start of the project in the timeline and what you found out in the findings, you know, of the research project in the research log.

Nicole (2m 34s):
And now just having that all together. But then you can use views to see starting point information in one view and then the whole log in another view and then new findings in another view. But all the same research log.

Diana (2m 49s):
That sounds great because as we continue to add phases to research it can get kind of confusing and so I’m excited to have a new variation of the Airtable log to work with. So Thank you for all the time you’re spending on that.

Nicole (3m 5s):
You are welcome. It’s been fun to get a lot of feedback from our followers on it too.

Diana (3m 10s):
Great

Nicole (3m 13s):
For announcements, our Webinar for the month of January, we’ll be by Amanda Sherwin and she will be teaching who was Robert Stewart’s wife using DNA clusters and genealogical research. And this is about Robert Stewart who was born in 1785 in Virginia. And this is a DNA case study. So we hope you’ll come and watch. She’ll be talking about autosomal D-N-A-D-N-A clusters, Land military and marriage records and Tennessee, Missouri, and Virginia. So this should be a great Webinar and if you haven’t purchased that Webinar series yet, you can buy that on our website for $60 and you’ll have lifetime access to view the webinars and to read the reports that accompany the presentation.

Nicole (3m 54s):
So instead of a traditional syllabus, the handout is the researcher’s report. So if you are wanting to learn how to write reports, this is a really great way to read 12 reports every single month we’ll have a new Webinar that has a report with it also the next DNA study group begins in February so we hope that you’ll join us and you can sign up for that with the early bird discount until January 10th.

Diana (4m 20s):
Alright, well let’s get back to our Scandinavian research with Torhild Shirley. Hi Torhild. Good. Is that Happy New Year or is that Hello? That’s happened New Year. That’s great. I love hearing you speak Norwegian to us. So just as a review, Torhild is a native Norwegian, she’s an accredited genealogist in the Norway region, but she does all the different Scandinavian countries for research. So in our very first podcast with Torhild, which was episode 285, we talked all about patronymics and naming traditions that are common in all the Scandinavian countries.

Diana (5m 6s):
And we also identified two research objectives as we’re trying to uniquely identify Rasmus Goodmanson who was born in Malus Sweden around 1719. And we discussed locality research for Cga Road and Nora Ram parishes and had a brief introduction to household examinations, church probate, tax and moving records. And we also looked at at repositories first records, so now we get to dive into the actual research and see what we found. So I tried to pronounce those correctly but I’m sure I was not as good as you were. Torhild. You do fine.

Diana (5m 48s):
Well I don’t speak the language but I’m listening to you and and trying to learn. Okay, so remind us again about our objectives.

Torhild (5m 58s):
So in our last episode we discovered two objectives for this research or for this case. The first objective was if Gudmund Rasmussen married twice, did he first marry Elsa to his daughter and then Karna Lars’s daughter or are these two separate families? We know that Gudmund could have had a son Rasmus with Elsa, his first wife, and then if both of them died, both Elsa and Rasmus and Gudmund married Karna, their oldest son would have been renamed for his deceased half brother. And so he too would’ve been named Rasmus or if these are two separate families, which of the two Rasmus married the two Hannahs, which we discussed in our last episode and died in Kta in 1773.

Torhild (6m 51s):
So those are two objectives.

Diana (6m 53s):
Great. And I just wanna remind our listeners that we have these two men named Rasmus and they each married a Hannah, correct?

Torhild (7m 2s):
No, so Rasmus actually married Hannah twice his first wife and his second wife was named Hannah.

Diana (7m 11s):
Okay, I just needed to be reminded of that. So we have a Rasmus who? Marys a Hannah both times. Okay. Yes.

Nicole (7m 18s):
Well that’s not confusing at all. I

Torhild (7m 22s):
Wonder if he did that just so he wouldn’t wake up one morning and call his wife.

Nicole (7m 30s):
Well it really highlights that challenge we talked about in the last episode where everyone has the similar names because they’re just reusing family names over and over. Well let’s talk about research planning with kind of these objectives of figuring out, you know, if this is the same person or separate two men, how did you proceed with the research planning?

Torhild (7m 53s):
So we did have some background information on Rasmus from his death record. We knew that he died in Kolter Parish on seven February, 1773. And according to his death record, he was born around 1719 in Ream. And we know that this is where he married his first wife and after he, she died, he moved to Kura where he married again before he passed away in 1773. But the death notice didn’t have an exact date for Rasmus birth. And our previous research, like we talked about, had identified two different Rasmus.

Torhild (8m 35s):
And so the first Rasmus was the son of Gudmund Rasmussen and Elsa to his daughter. And he was born in 1718 in Koru, while the second one was also son of Gudmund Rasmussen. But this time the mother was car lodge’s daughter and he was born on sixth March in 1720 in Lura. So we were wondering, considering that these fathers had the same name, is it possible that he married twice? Because we know that per the naming tradition, if a child died it was common to pass their name onto the next child of the same gender and death rates were very high both for mothers and children.

Torhild (9m 16s):
And so it is possible that Elsa and her son Rasmus passed away in 1718 or early 1719 And that Gudmund remarried to Karna and then gave birth to Rasmus in 1720. So this is kind of where we needed to start working on separating and finding out if we were dealing with two separate families or if we were dealing with one Gudmund Rasmussen who married twice and had two sons named Rasmus.

Nicole (9m 47s):
All right, well I’m looking forward to seeing the research plan but I’m guessing we’re gonna look at some marriage records.

Torhild (9m 52s):
So usually the first record you would use in Sweden is the household examinations. We talked about ’em in our last episode because they are so amazing. They’re census like records that were recorded every year and usually they would include not only the farm but the family lived on, but the names of the entire family, their birth dates in all the records, only the birth year but still a a good source. It would include a birthplace relationships, vital events like marriage and death where people moved in and out of the parish and they’re just an awesome way to follow a family for decades. Our problem was that household examinations didn’t start until 1773 in Olga and 1806 Inam and this was after Rasmus died.

Torhild (10m 38s):
And so the household examinations were useless to us, but there is a really good substitute for household examinations, which is tax records. The tax records are not nearly as complete in information as the household examinations, but they’re still very useful. Records. Tax records for both and ream are available from 1642 and they just like the household examinations were commonly recorded every year. So starting around the time of Rasmus birth around 1719, we consistently found a Gudmund Rasmussen on Ben Sega farm in Koru and another Gudmund Rasmussen on Erda rum farm in rum until 1728 when there was an eight year gap in tax records.

Diana (11m 30s):
So because we find men in different places being taxed around the same time, are we guessing that these are two separate men? Is that our hypothesis

Torhild (11m 42s):
Right now? That is our, our hypothesis. It wouldn’t be very common for the same person to own property in two different parishes and therefore be taxed in two different parishes. So we, we definitely do have a hint that that we are dealing with two separate families.

Nicole (11m 59s):
Okay. It’s so helpful to see that they were living in two different places, at least like you mentioned, that’s the current hypothesis. Well what about church records? Can those shed more light on it?

Torhild (12m 12s):
So we have already used church records to find the two Rasmus that we are not sure if they’re the siblings or if they are belonging to two separate families. But we also found, well as we were going through these church records that Gudmund who lived on Benga farm in Ura, he died on the 19th of October in 1730. So now we at least we have a death date and we know that that family kind of ends in 1730 with Gudmund dying. We also found that Gudmund who lived on rum in in rum, he had several children born after Rasmus birth in 1720 including a child pair who was born in 1732.

Torhild (13m 0s):
So by now this family had moved to Birk of the farm in Ura. So they’re both now in Ter Parish. But we know that the first Gudmund died in 1730. The second Gudmund had a child in 1732 and the second Gudmund died in Kura in 1771. So at this point we don’t know exactly when Gudmund and Karna moved from Noam to Kura. We don’t know exactly what happened right there. And so we know that Gudmund would have met with his parish priest and talked to him about getting a moving certificate. So this moving certificate would testify that the family was of good standing with the church.

Torhild (13m 41s):
They didn’t have any criminal records they could provide for themselves or they had somebody in their new parish who could provide for them. And it was really essential for a family to prove that they wouldn’t be a burden on their new parish. And these records often include detailed information about each family member. Unfortunately, like we talked about in our our last episode, these weren’t valued as much as regular church records and a lot of the moving records have not been kept, which was the case likely for Gudmund because we could not find any moving records for Gudmund Rasmussen’s family. However, with information that we have right now, it seemed logical to provide or or to produce a timeline to see how all of this information fit together.

Torhild (14m 29s):
So we know that Gudmund and Elsa who lived on Ben Sega farm in Koru had a Sun Rasmus born in 1718. We could not find any more children born to that family and to Gudmund died. Died in 1730 while Gudmund and Karna who started off in rum, they were the parents of Rasmus born in 1720, but they also had a child in 1732. So this was two years after the death of Gudmund and Kura. so it seems like now with the birth of more children and with separate deaths that we do have an answer to our question

Nicole (15m 9s):
That’s really helpful to know that one died And, that the other one had a lot of children even after the death of the first one that’s really helping to separate them apart.

Diana (15m 19s):
And I love that in the blog post you put a copy of the timeline that you created and you had a column for Gudmund and Karen and a column for Gudmund and else. So I think timelines are fabulous when you’re trying to separate people so that you can clearly see what was happening. So that’s a great methodology, a great tool to use for a project like this. Well let’s have a word from our sponsor, newspapers.com. newspapers.com is your ultimate resource for discovering your family’s history. Explore more than 800 million newspaper pages in their vast collections spanning three centuries.

Diana (16m 1s):
newspapers.com is your gateway to exploring the past with papers from the us, uk, Canada, Australia and beyond. Trace your family’s journey and uncover the extraordinary tales of your Ancestors through newspaper stories, birth and marriage announcements, obituaries, photos, and much more. For listeners of today’s show, newspapers.com is extending a discount of 20% off on a Publisher extra subscription Just. Use the code, FamilyLocket it at checkout. Don’t miss out on this incredible opportunity. All right, so continuing on Torhild, it seems clear we are talking about two different families with a head of household named Gudmund Rasmussen and a son named Rasmus Goodmanson And one family lived on Benig farm in Cga Road while the other family started out on Sora RA Farm Andra before moving to Boca Tofa farm in Cga Road.

Diana (16m 58s):
Again, I don’t know if I said any of that even halfway correct, but we get the picture. So now it’s time to tackle our next objective I believe. And what is that?

Torhild (17m 8s):
I love your pronunciation Diane.

Diana (17m 10s):
That’s great. Well Thank you, I’m trying.

Torhild (17m 15s):
I think you’re doing great. So we now know we ha we’re dealing with two separate families with that. We also know that we’re dealing with two separate Rasmus. One was born in 1718, the other one was born in 1720, but we don’t know which one of them died in Kro in 1773. So now we need to find out which one of these two Rasmus is actually the Ancestor that we are looking for. And in all the records that we had looked at so far, the closest we got to anything that would give a birthdate for Rasmus was his death record of 1773, which says that he was born in about 1719, which is right that Schmack in between the two Rasmus we have.

Torhild (17m 59s):
So we’re still stuck. There were no household examinations available at the time that he he lived because they didn’t start at until after his death. And so naturally now I would move to probate records. We have the deaths of both Goodmans and the probate record, like we mentioned earlier, are great records to find heirs of a person by Swedish law. Everybody who died should have their estate probated within three months to ensure that all the rightful heirs got their share. So in addition to listing property and debts that the deceased had for us, what’s important is that it usually listed all the heirs, which would be either siblings, children, spouses, so anybody close to to the deceased.

Torhild (18m 48s):
And it would often also record not only their names and their relationship but at times their spouses and maybe even their children depending on how the, the inheritance was spread out at times. It could also include the age of the minor. So there’s a lot of details that could be found in those probate records. Unfortunately there were no probate records available for Gudmund of Benge or for Gudmund of Tafta. So one died in 1730, the other one in 1771. Fortunately those probate records likely went missing over time or they are in a condition where they has yet have to be digitalized and and put online.

Torhild (19m 32s):
There were some endless books for the region available online, but none of the two Gudmund were found in there nor were there wives. And so now we’re kind of stuck right there as far as probate records go and as far as regular church records when it come to trying to find Rasmus in there. So now it’s time to try to turn the attention to Rasmus children to see could there be any clues among his children.

Diana (19m 60s):
Well I can see why this has been such a difficult case because the records that you typically would use are not available. And so I love that. Now we’re going to have to go to probably indirect evidence we’re going to have to go to to the next step to figure this out.

Nicole (20m 19s):
So what would the next step be? Can we use the naming patterns that we talked about to prove relationships?

Torhild (20m 26s):
That is our goal, our hope. ’cause that is very often the way you would separate your families is looking at what they name their children. So as we talked about earlier, the oldest son would be named for his paternal grandfather while the second oldest son would be named for his maternal grandfather. And so we would look at these names of the children of Rasmus and see, okay, did he name his children after his parents and also his wife’s parents. And we’re gonna end up with a lot of names and a lot of dates in in this case. And so it might be helpful to look at the blog post just to get your head clear as you’re listening to this podcast.

Torhild (21m 13s):
’cause there are a lot of names that are the same and and could be hard to wrap your head around. So previous research before we started this case had identified Rasmus children with his first wife Hannah. This is the first Hannah whose name is Hannah Ander’s daughter. His second wife was Hannah David’s daughter. So these are the children of Hannah Ander’s daughter. They had a Paul who was born in 1745 Elsa in 1747 pair born in 1749 Anders in 1752. Another Paul born in 1755 Es born in 1757, Elna 1760, Nils 1762 and Ingar 1765.

Torhild (22m 5s):
We know that Elsa, her father’s name was Tua because her last name was Tuas daughter. Well there is no Tua among these children and Karna, her father’s name was Lars because Karna was named Lars daughter. So those are the two wives of Gudmund, which would’ve been potential mothers of Rasmus. Well there is no Lars among this children. So let’s look at the second set of family that he had with his wife Hannah, David’s daughter. ’cause he had three children with her. The first one, Hannah was born in 1767. They had a second Hannah in 1769.

Torhild (22m 47s):
And an Anders born in 1771. It’s very clear we don’t have a Tua, we don’t have a Lars, we don’t even have a Gudmund in here. So clearly Rasmus does did not follow the traditional naming tradition by renaming grandparents as they were naming their children. However, we do see that they did follow some conventions. Several of the children passed away. So Paul passed away who was born in 1745 and he was renamed in 17 55, 10 years later, which was the first son born after Paul passed away in 1754.

Torhild (23m 27s):
Anders who was born in 1752 also passed away and he was renamed in 1771. We also know that Rasmus first wife Hannah passed away and the first child that Rasmus had with his second wife was named Hannah. This child died, they had another girl and she was also named Hannah. So we see that they are some, some naming traditions that they followed, but they did not follow the traditional renaming of parents and grandparents. So in this case we really can’t lean on the names of the children.

Torhild (24m 8s):
We do know that Rasmus with his first wife did have a child named Elsa. And we also know that Rasmus born in 1718, his mother name was Elsa And. that could give us a little hint that maybe that could be the parents, but where they didn’t follow the naming convention in in every other aspect. That just wasn’t enough to be able to say that this really is the case.

Nicole (24m 36s):
Oh, that’s too bad that we couldn’t say for sure. But it is helpful to analyze that and try to think about any connections like the connection you made with Elsa and put that together with the whole case.

Diana (24m 48s):
Well since naming patterns didn’t help us a lot and the records that we typically use are not there, what do we do next?

Torhild (24m 58s):
So the next thing we’re gonna look at is still in ve church records, the Lutheran Church, the Traditionist Christian child at a very young age, usually just a few days old. And then you have godparents or witnesses that are included with this. The godparents responsibility was for the religious upbringing of a child and very often they would step in if something happened to the parents. And so for this reason, most godparents were chosen among close family members and very, very close friends like parents, siblings and cousins of the father and the mother were the most common choices, but at times close friends and neighbors might give be given the honor ’cause it really was an honor to be asked to be a godparent of a child.

Torhild (25m 47s):
So as our naming conventions did not give us any answers, our next step would be to review all the godparents of Rasmus children in hopes of finding either of Rasmus siblings and or parents listed as godparents. We have earlier identified Rasmus of Noam and his siblings as Cecilia la Christina and Pear. As we did research on Gudmund of Benge, we found that his children, so the siblings of Rasmus born in in Koru were Ana Olaf, Lin Neils, Carl, and Karna in addition to Rasmus, Rasmus was the last child.

Torhild (26m 38s):
So now that we have all the siblings in place for each of these two Rasmus, it is time to go and look at these godparents to see did Rasmus ask any of his siblings to be godparents on for his children? And he did. So six of Rasmus children have a sibling as godparent, which means they also gave a lot of honor to other people that were not family members or maybe they were siblings of Hannah. And we didn’t research her side of the family as far as godparents went. So Cecilia or she was called Cssa in the church records and that’s a common nickname for Cecilia.

Torhild (27m 22s):
She was the godmother of Paul ish and the second Paul who was named after the first one after he passed away. So she was the godmother of three children and she is the sister of Rasmus, born in 1720. So the Rasmus of in addition Pear who is also the sibling of Rasmus Ra, he was the god’s father of Paul II and also of in God. And additionally we have Rasmus of Ram’s sister Christina who was the godparent of Hannah.

Torhild (28m 4s):
So we see that out of those children, five of out of Rasmus children had siblings that matched Rasmus of 1720 from Noam. But one of these children, Nils had as his godmother, Karna, which is the daughter of Rasmus from Kura. And so we still have both families involved, but with one being heavily used than the other ones, it’s time to start drawing some conclusions.

Diana (28m 40s):
Wow. Nothing is coming easy in this one, is it? And I also noticed that this Rasmus had a sibling named Pear. Did he name a child pear as well?

Torhild (28m 54s):
He did,

Diana (28m 55s):
Yeah. So I can see how maybe the evidence is weighing a little heavier on one family than on the other, but you know, this would be a conflict and we can’t just ignore that.

Nicole (29m 6s):
That was really cool to see how that strategy helped so much though because that name Cecilia, knowing that Cisa is a common spelling of Cecilia, being able to put that together and provide a little more evidence for the Rasmus of Norad dam is really exciting. Alright, well let’s go on to our connections and conclusions. So what did you decide were the connections and conclusions from this?

Torhild (29m 37s):
So since it weighed so heavily on Rasmus from nra, I figured that is most likely the correct person. But I also had to figure out why did Karna, who was the daughter of the other Gudmund and the sister of the, the Rasmus from 1718, why had she been given the honor of becoming a godparent? There had been no obvious connection between these two families previous, they lived in separate parishes and when Rasmus of Norum moved into Kokoru, they still lived on separate farms. So how did she get involved in this and would that explain why she is a godparent?

Torhild (30m 18s):
So when I find out was that Karna was born in 1714 on Benga farm to Gudmund Rasmussen and Elsie to his daughter. She married a guy called Nils Matteson and he lived on a farm called Oscar Gordon. And this was a farm in rum, which means she married a guy who lived most likely fairly close to where Gudmund Rasmussen of rum lived. So there’s a really good chance that these two families knew each other. But in addition to that, after Nils and Karna married, they moved to Kota farm in Kru.

Torhild (31m 1s):
And this is where Rasmus and Hannah lived. So we can see that suddenly now these two families have become close both through the marriage in in rum, but then also through living on the same farm in Kura And. that would explain why Karna was giving the honor of being a godparent to one Rasmus children. So with that in mind and with all the other proofs that we have, we can now draw a conclusion.

Nicole (31m 35s):
Wow, that is wonderful. Good job.

Diana (31m 37s):
So tell us what the final conclusion is.

Torhild (31m 41s):
Okay, I just had to keep the suspense a little bit longer. So what this research aimed to do was to determine if Gudmund Rasmussen of Noam and Gudmund Rasmussen of Cora were the same or two different people. And we determined that these were two separate people with separate families. And so this time we were trying to Discover, okay, which of the two Rasmus born in 1718 or 1720 would be our Ancestor who died in 1773 and using the godparents and namings. The determination is that it is very likely that Rasmus who was born in 1720 in Notam is the correct Ancestor that we want to add to our tree.

Diana (32m 29s):
Okay, well that was a fabulous case study and I especially appreciate that it was really difficult. This wasn’t just an easy look at the church records or household examinations and it was all laid out for you. You had to do such deep research on this and keep really good records. So wonderful, wonderful case study. Thanks so much for leading us through that and teaching us all about how we would research in Sweden or other Scandinavian countries.

Torhild (32m 58s):
My pleasure. It was a fun case.

Nicole (33m 2s):
Yes, very instructive. Thank you so much Torhild. This has been such a fun episode, talking with Torhild, finishing up our Scandinavian research episodes and hearing this case study and hopefully if you have a case where you’ve been wanting to dive into Scandinavian research that this series can help you out. And if you would like to have us work on your project, Torhild is part of FamilyLocket at Genealogists, so let us know and we can get started on Researching your Scandinavian family for you. Thanks everyone for listening and we will talk to you again next week. Bye-Bye

Diana (33m 40s):
Bye. Bye everyone.

Torhild (33m 41s):
Bye.

Nicole (33m 43s):
Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our books, Research Like, a Pro and Research Like a Pro with DA on amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at FamilyLocket dot com slash services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday. Subscribe to our newsletter at FamilyLocket dot com slash newsletter. Please Subscribe rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.