A Word About
Norwegian Names
aka A Boy Named Ellen
By Bernie Shellum
My great-grandfather was Anders Andersen Sandboeie, who was born in Vågå parish, near the northern end of Norway's Gudbrandsdal Valley, in 1829.His family had lived, worked and died in Vågå for centuries. At that time, the community was being squeezed as Norwegians from the south crowded northward, looking for scarce land to till. Fields and pastures were climbing out of the valley and up the sides of Norway's tallest mountains a few miles away.Just four years earlier, the first group of emigrants to America, Quakers who came to be known as the Sloopers, had left Stavanger on a sailboat they had built themselves. Over the next century, some 900,000 Norwegians would follow the Sloopers. Only Ireland would send a bigger proportion of its citizens to the New World.Most of my ancestors joined the emigration bulge of the late 1860s and early 1870s, after the Civil War had ended and the railroad was pushing westward into the fertile farmland of the Upper Midwest. There, as much as 160 acres of free land lay waiting for anyone who asked.In Norway, my ancestors had nowhere to go. They were hemmed in not only by a shortage of farmland, but by laws and traditions seemingly designed to preserve every aspect of the status quo.My great-grandfather's parents didn't even have much choice over their new son's name. It would be Anders, after his paternal grandfather, as custom dictated.The rest of it also was preordained by Norwegian traditions. Andersen was not really a name, but a patronym that meant he was a son of a man named Anders. Sandbo was the name of the farm where he was born.For purists, like me, I hasten to add that the "eie" - shortened by my ancestors to "ie" - at the end of Sandbo had a meaning of its own. It revealed that Anders didn't live on the main farm, but on one of Sandbo's sub-farms. In American terms, he was a tenant farmer.The name of the sub-farm was Skjællum, which was sometimes spelled Skjellum, Sjellum or Sjellom. That's the origin of my family name. It was pronounced with a heavy accent on the first syllable.My great-grandfather, like most of the Norwegian emigrants, was a husmann. That is, he worked as a laborer on the main farm for a specified number of days each year. In return, he received a small wage and a husmannsplass, a cottage and a tiny plot of land.Norwegian experts estimate that he had no more than five acres under cultivation. Still, that was a bigger spread than the average husmannsplass. As of 1865, four years before they emigrated, Anders and his wife and five children were growing barley and potatos and had one horse, four cows, six goats and 12 sheep. The horse, too, suggests that the household was better off than the average husmann.Over the three years leading up to emigration two more children were born, the second being Hans, on Dec. 19, 1868. Just five months later, on May 26, 1869, Anders and his family packed food, tools and clothing and set out on their three-month journey to America, where Hans would eventually become my grandfather.All of my 19th Century ancestors were Norwegian farmers, which meant that none of them had permanent surnames. Some Norwegians did have surnames that passed from one generation to the next, but most of them were city folk or educated members of the upper class - the clergy, military officers and high-ranking public officials.My ancestors, on the other hand, were simply Anders, or Ola, or Peder. When necessary, in everyday dealings or conversation, they, or those who were talking about them, would add a patronym such as Andersen (son of Anders), or Olsen, or Pedersen, depending on the father's first name. The patronym was not a baptismal name, but rather an informal identifier. The female form was "datter," as in Kari Pedersdatter Sandbusgarden, my great-grandmother. To further identify themselves, and distinguish themselves from anyone similarly named, rural Norwegians added the farm name as an address. In other words, Anders Andersen Sandboeie was a son of a man named Anders and lived on a husmannsplass owned by Sandbo.Nowadays, it is sometimes said that our Norwegian ancestors used the farm name as a surname, but that was true only when a farm had passed from father to oldest son for generations. For my ancestors in Norway, the farm name was an address. It was my immigrant ancestors who converted the old farm names to surnames.Other naming traditions placed further limits on the options of Norwegian farmers.A first-born son, for instance, was named after his paternal grandfather, and the second son took the name of his maternal grandfather. The third son was named after his father, and the fourth after the father's oldest brother. Similarly, a first-born daughter was named after her maternal grandmother and the second after her paternal grandmother. The third daughter was named after her mother, and the fourth after the mother's oldest sister.When those names had been used up, the children were given the names of great-grandparents, in no particular order.If a widowed person remarried and had children with the new spouse, the first child of the same gender was given the dead spouse's name.Thus, the first-born son of Anders Andersen Sandboeie was named Anders, after the baby's grandfather, Anders Andersen Sjellum, born in Vågå in 1802. The second-born son, Peder, was named after his mother Kari's father, Peder Jakobsen Sandbu. Then the third-born son, Jakob, received the name of Peder Jakobsen's father, Jakob Pedersen Sandbu.A careful reader may have noticed that Kari Pedersdatter Sandbusgarden's family was peculiarly honored in bestowing its names on two of Anders Andersen Sandboeie's first three sons. When naming tradition was violated like that, an inheritance often was involved.Childhood death, which was not uncommon, imposed another limitation on names. Custom required that a next-born son take the name of a son who had died, or the next-born daughter the name of a dead daughter.That is how my grandmother, Randine Nelson, got her name. When I first spotted the name Randine Johannesdatter on an online Norwegian census of Tretten parish, I was elated. It didn't matter that her birth was reported to have taken place in 1865, because that year's census was often wrong on birth dates and ages. I was sure it was the baby girl who would later marry Hans Andersen Sandboeie and give birth to 10 children, including my father, at the old homestead in Nelson Twp., Watonwan County, MN.Randine was just one year old when she set out for America from Tretten parish, just north of Lillehammer, with her brother Even and parents, Johannes Nielsen Hagebakken and Ingeborg Erlandsdatter Hovsveen, in 1866. The family spent several years in Chicago, where Johannes worked as a carpenter, before moving on to homestead the farm where I grew up on the south shore of Lake Hanska in Brown County, MN. While trying to trace this long journey, I came to realize that this Randine was not my grandmother after all, that this Randine had died somewhere along the way, becoming one of five or six children in her family who failed to reach adulthood. At her birth on Sept. 2, 1874, in Minnesota, my grandmother Randine had received her dead sister's name.Of the Nelsen children, apparently the only one who survived childhood, besides Even and my grandmother Randine, was Mina. She is our link to the Haycraft family, which immigrated from England in the early 1700s, fought for America in the Revolutionary War, then migrated westward to Kentucky, and eventually to Minnesota.Under Norwegian naming conventions, emigration was tantamount to death. The journey to America was perceived as a one-way trip. Those left behind did not expect to see any of the emigrants again. So, the names of the emigrants went back into play.Rønnaug Frantsdatter Lien, a sister of my immigrant great-grandfather Ole Frantssen Lien and his brother Frants, remained in Norway, where she married Peder Thoresen Rusten. Following custom, she named her first son, born in 1845 when she was just 19, Frants. He eventually emigrated to America. In 1870, at age 44, Rønnaug had another son, and named him Frants. This Frants also went to America. By then, however, Rønnaug was far past child-bearing age.Emigration even toyed with the names of those already dead, especially when entire families, such as my Vågå ancestors, left.After their departure, no close relatives were left in Norway to pay the fee that the state church charged for the upkeep of cemeteries. The grace period sometimes stretched to 20 years, but if the fee still remained unpaid the churches simply hauled the gravestones of the deadbeats to storage, buried someone else on top of the first coffin, and allowed the newly grieving relatives to put up a new gravestone.Now, Americans troop through Norway's cemeteries searching fruitlessly for ancestors, as I did in the summer of 1999. I could not find any trace in the Vågå cemetery of Anders Andersen Sjellum or Ragnhild Hansdatter Øyagarden, my great-great-grandparents, who died in the 1860s, a few years before their offspring left.But they are there, under someone else's name.Norwegian naming practices began to change in the second half of the 19th Century, when the female patronym fell into disuse and daughters, too, began taking the male patronym "sen." This pattern was reflected among Norwegians who had gone to America. Take my other grandmother, a daughter of immigrants Johan Eiløfsen Brøste and Gullow Andersdatter Stavem, from Grytten parish in Romsdalen. When she married my grandfather, John Lee, in 1897, she was Anna Johnson, not Johansdatter.By the turn of the century, the Norwegian government, still under Swedish control, was actively encouraging Norwegians to select permanent surnames, and many families already had done so. In 1923, Norway, by then a sovereign nation, began requiring it by law. The question was, which name should they choose? For many, the answer was the patronym they already were using. These names - Johnson, Nelson, Anderson, Peterson, Jacobson, Olson, Rasmusson, etc. - came to be known as "frozen patronyms." Others chose the name of the farm where they had lived in Norway. My Norwegian cousin, Johannes Rusten, who scrutinized this essay for accuracy, says that a flourishing immigrant farmer would sometimes choose the old farm name as his surname to one-up those who had used him badly in Norway. In other cases, he says, they chose that name to honor the place they had left.It fell to immigrants on the American frontier to harvest what their Norwegian ancestors had been sowing for generations. It was a harvest of confusion. Tradition had dictated that relatively few names be used, and that those names be recycled again and again and again.Now, among my ancestors, there were three Anders Andersons under one roof - my great-grandfather and two of his sons. Several others lurked among the relatives of my grandmother, Anna Johnson, who also farmed near Lake Hanska. Dozens of others, unrelated, lived down the road, or in LaSalle, St. James, Madelia or New Ulm.Anders Andersens (or sons) who applied for homesteads in Minnesota numbered in the hundreds.The mail often found its way to the wrong house.The immigrants, of course, had a natural urge to appear American, so they changed their names with abandon, sometimes to get rid of those pesky Ø, ø, Æ, æ, Å, å, Ö, and ö characters that had survived the evolution of Old German to Norwegian, and now baffled non-Norwegians.My ancestors followed suit. My great-grandfather took the name Andrew. But so did his two sons named Anders, who would eventually own their own farms nearby. Now, there were three fewer Anders Andersons but three more Andrew Andersons in the community.I don't think it helped.My great-grandfather had emigrated as Anders Andersen Sandboeie. As far as I can determine, he and his wife Kari, and their children began using Anderson (the American spelling) as a surname soon after their arrival in Minnesota, and kept doing so until the late 1870s. In the 1880 Minnesota census, however, the parents and eight children still at home were using the name Sjellum.By then, the oldest son, Andrew, had gone off to farm on his own across the road in Albin Twp., Brown County. He and his wife, Elizabeth, and baby son, Adolph, were using the more-American name Shellum.It didn't stop there. Hans, a brother of patriarch Andrew Sjellum and uncle of oldest son Andrew Shellum, also farmed nearby. He and his family still were using the surname Anderson in 1880.In other words, my immigrant ancestors from Vågå had left Norway without any surname, but a decade after their arrival in Minnesota they had at least three of them. This was not unusual. In some cases, families still living in the same house used several different surnames.Most of the other immigrant farmers followed a similar pattern, taking as surnames simplified versions of old Norwegian farm names, hoping to fit in among Americans who valued simplicity. The farm name Brudeliøien, where some of Anna Johnson's relatives had lived in Romsdalen, became the surname Brudelie in Minnesota. Grøtta became Grotta. Brøste became Broste, and sometimes Bruste. Lien and Lia became Lee. Slætta became Sletta. But Brude, Hovde, Sandbo and Tande appear to have passed muster as they were.In preparing this family history, I have disregarded the name transformations of the immigrants. Here, individuals are known by their original names, whether they were born in Norway or the United States. This will make it easier for other genealogists who might take up searches that involve my ancestors.Moreover, name changes that may have taken place earlier become evident in later generations. Bear in mind that rural Norwegians did not place a high value on standardized spelling in the 19th Century, and wrote names in a variety of ways.Take Ellen Rasmussen, one of my ancestors from Romsdalen. No, I am not mistakenly using the patronym Rasmussen instead of Rasmusdatter. Ellen was male. Thirteen years old at the time of the 1801 census, he would later become my great-great-grandfather.Glenn Murray, a distant cousin who is a native of Romsdalen and still maintains a remote mountain cabin there, says that Rasmussen is an example of "the pitfalls of the local dialect.""Ellen in this area is often seen as the written form of names like Ellev, Erlling, Erlend, Elling, etc.""By the way, this Ellen/Ellev thing is by no means worst case; Beret, Brit, Birgithe, Berite, etc., was, according to local custom, the same name."
