The Mystery of Skjoiten

There is something that I would love to accomplish during this project and that I am not overly hopeful that I will accomplish...that is to learn where the name "Skjoiten", the rare, very Skandinavian last name that I grew up with.  There are many other names in the family that are pretty common Skandinavian names, such as "Bjerke" and "Borg".  If you search those names there are thousands of hits that appear and most of the people are not related to each other at all.  If someone is named "Skjoiten", however, they are most certainly related to me. 

This has been challenging because, prior to immigrating to America, Norwegians used a system of naming referred to as "patronymic".  This means that people's last names were derived from their father's first name.  And also, almost everyone was named after their grandparents or other relatives, with first born children named after the father's parents.  So names get repetitious and no generation has the same surname.  Women went by their maiden name even after marriage (so my name would have probably been Dorothy Timothysdatter and my cousin Kara would be named Dorothy Galesdatter). 

This all means that looking at archives gets very confusing once you trace back to the ancestors that were born in Norway.  For example, here is a little mini branch of my family tree...

Timothy Skjoiten (My dad)---Glenn Skjoiten (His dad)---Gustav Skjoiten---(my great grandfather)---Peder Olsen Skjoiten (my great great grandfather and the one who came to America in 1893)---and then it gets crazy---Ole Engebretson Reiarsletten-Shoyten.  This Ole character is apparently my great x 3 grandfather.  So if Peder Skjoiten stayed in Norway his name would have been plain old Peder Olsen.  And I have no idea what that Reiarsletten-Shoyten business is about.  There is no birthday given or place of birth.  The information about him came from another Ancestry.com member's family tree and the member has quite an in depth project so I believe he might have actually travelled to Norway and might be able to read Norwegian.  I did an online translation of the word "sletten" and it means "plain".  I assume it refers to the naturally occuring plain as opposed to something that looks plain.  So Maybe Reiarsletten was the name of a town or a farm.  Also, the spelling of "Shoyten" seems all wrong to me.  My knowledge of Norwegian is limited but I know that the "Sh" sound is spelled "Skj" or "Sj".  Also, the letter Y doesn't stand alone like that.  The OY sound is made with the character that American keyboards don't have but Norwegian ones do...the letter O with a slash through it. 

I was typing random words and names into Google, trying to see if I could find anything beyond what Ancestry.com had.  Ancestry has quite a few old Norwegian records from the 1500s-1900s but they are only complete for certain regions of the country.  The Skjoitens came from the parish of Hol in the county called Buskerud and the records from that area are mediocre.  While dinking around on Google I came across a very fascinating website that sucked up an hour of my night before I even realized the time had passed and completely drew my attention away from the MTV show I was planning on watching. 

http://www.digitalarkivet.no/cgi-win/WebFront.exe?slag=vis&tekst=meldingar&spraak=e

This website is the digital version of the National Records of Norway!  Holy crap there is alot of information on this site.  There are pictures of hundreds of old farms, census records, church records recording births, weddings and confirmations, and probate records.  The challenging part is that, although the website has an English version, the actual records are in Norwegian. Also, these records, as well as most of the records on Ancestry.com, are scanned from handwritten records and they can be hard to read.  Spelling mishaps very common when the records are converted to digital format. For example, there is a whole census record for my "Borg" relatives that were transcribed as "Barg" because whoever wrote the record had a low tail on their letter "o".  There is so much to sort through!

So...I will continue to try to find where "Skjoiten" came from.  Check back for more!

Welcome to my Ancestry Blog

Many of you are reading this after being directed to this blog from my other blog that is filled with mundane details about my life, my cat, and stuff my husband, Justin, and I do around the house interspersed with my attempts to be funny.  This blog is going to have an actual focus. 

I became intriqued with geneology and history when I was in middle school.  My grandmother, Dorothy Skjoiten, has a well documented family history published in a book that has been updated a few times throughout the years.  This book is known as "The Bjerke Book" in family vernacular and it traces her family history back to the 1870's when the family came to America.  This book introduced me to Berthe Maria Hagen Bjerke, my great great great grandmother who came to the prairie of Minnesota and then North Dakota in 1878, 11 years before N.D. was a state.  The tales of claim shanties and sod houses in the Bjerke Book seemed like my family's own version of Little House on the Prairie and I was fascinated.  I started reading about geneology in books and on the Internet and came across the following starting point for a family tree...

"Each human has eight biological great grandparents...and most Americans cannot name them all."

So I decided that I would be able to name all of mine.  Of course, there were the easy ones...Grandma Mina, Grandpa Lund, Grandpa Skjoiten...these were the three that lived to pose with me in photos.  The others were more challenging but my parents knew the answers.  However, they could not name most of their great grandparents.  I asked my Grandma Dorothy if she could name her great grandparents and she burst out laughing and said "Ahh!  I don't think any of them even spoke English!"  So...here I go...

Melvin Bjerke and Whilelmina Meldahl
Gustav Skjoiten and Myrtle Bjertness
Norris Lund and Margaret Kalin
Carl Borg and Gida Aarstad

This fascination still continues and I got a wonderful surprise for my birthday this year!  It was my dad's idea...my parents gave me a membership to the website Ancestry.com!  Oh my...that website can suck me in and an hour can pass in the evening without me even knowing what has happened.  Some of the ancestors have been traced by other users back to the 1500's and 1600's!  It truly makes my head spin and I thought this blog would help me organize the information 

Artemark, Alvsborgs Lan, Vastra Gotaland, Hallingdal, Sykkleven, Romsdal, Tromso, Hallingdal...These are some of the places that my ancestors came from.  Both Justin and I are about as Skandinavian as a modern day American can be.  My dad's side of the family is, as far as I have discovered, of 100% Norwegian ancestry and my mom's side has ancestors from Norway and Sweden as well (Diversity)!

So...my eyes hurt from getting this blog organized and typing this entry so I am going to end there for today.  Check back because I do intend to share ancestry information on here and either share screen shots of Ancestry.com records or post links to Ancestry.com pages.  I am not crazy about the layout and appearance right now...I don't know why the background I added doesn't reach to the top of the page and I feel like I have tried everything to change it and nothing works.  But enjoy what I have so far!