NORWAY-L Archives

Archiver > NORWAY > 1997-11 > 0878421586


From: <>
Subject: Cousins by the Dozens
Date: Sat, 1 Nov 1997 16:59:46 -0500 (EST)


Hi All,

Steven Moen's message about all the Leikanger relatives he has found prompts
me to report on a phenomenon that occurs in Ärdal, which is the kommune of my
father's family.

As some of you may know (if you have been to www.sffarkiv.no/test/neil.htm),
I constructed a PAF data base containing the entire contents of the Årdal
bygdebok. This means that I have every known person who ever lived there
before there were any towns (or villages, cities, townships, thorps, or
whatever. I don't want to start anything with anybody anywhere!) and all of
their known descendants living any place in Norway. When I finished I had
about 16,500 individuals, including the American descendants of my 4 emigrant
ancestors. I had no idea how many family trees I had created because I built
the data base in a manner different than one normally does.

In the normal case you start with your parents, add grandparents, great
grandparents, etc. and pick up all the brother and sister, or cousin, lines
that you can find. But you are building one family tree.

I built the Årdal data base by opening up the bygdebok to page one and
entering everyone on that page, then page 2, then 3, and so on until I got to
page 971, which was the end. This was not straight forward data entry. In
order to prevent duplicate entry of individuals, after I entered a name for
the first time I had to find every other occurrence of that name any where in
the book and annotate it with the Record Identification Number of the
individual. This enabled me to know who had been previously entered when I
got to them again. Normally this was limited to where the individual was
listed as somebody's spouse, or the father or mother of an illegitimate
child, of which there were plenty.

By the time I finished I had done enough rather tedious cross-referencing to
know there was a lot of intermarriage, but I had no idea how many family
trees I had created.

I have a nifty little program written by Ann Turner called "Forest". It
analyzes PAF data bases to determine how many "trees" are in your "forest."
The normal reason to run the program is to find out if you have individuals
or families that are not linked to your tree. If you do, you have made some
kind of mistake and need to fix it because you only want one tree.

Sadly, this dandy program won't work on PAF 3.0 data. I am hoping that Ann
writes a new version.

This program follows each and every line of all generations back in time to
the earliest ancestor and then turns around and comes forward picking up all
brother and sister, or cousin, lines of every family. Every one in the
resulting tree is related by either blood or marriage.

I ran Forest on my 16,500 individuals and found out I had only created 7
trees. However all but 71 individuals were in one really big tree!! I
thought Ann's program was goofy until I started thinking about it. Now I am
convinced the program works just fine.

Årdal was really remote. In the 1801 census there were only a little over
800 individuals living on about 32 gards spread over essentially one narrow
valley about 15 miles long. People did not move around or travel far from
home. From the furtherest west gard it was still about 10 to 15 miles by boat
to the next inhabited spot. To go anywhere east, north, or south you had to
be a mountain goat. While many of my Årdal ancestors practiced animal
husbandry, sexual activity was strictly limited to local humans or those
coming in from the west. Any being showing up from the east, north, or south
was suspected as being at least part goat and were not welcomed into the fun
loving milieu of intermarriage that was going on. Those coming in from the
west and marrying someone become a member of the family and all their
descendants are as well. Once you are related to someone you are always
related to someone, and so are all of your descendants. Given a couple
hundred years or so, it is almost inevitable that all the locals will be
related somehow.

When I first revealed my finding it was greeted with jaundiced skepticism in
America and a certain amount of embarrassed squeamishness by those in Årdal.
Upon reasoned reflection by intelligent individuals, they soon agree with
me. Those that don't are obviously mentally deranged or just plain
meatheads. I feel certain I will not have to suffer any doubting Thomases on
the NORWAY List.

There are 2 reasons this phenomenon has not been discovered before. First,
only a computer could track all the various relationships in a large group of
people. Doing it by hand would be impossible. Second, I don't think any one
has every been nutty enough to build a data base containing everyone who ever
lived in a kommune. If there is another please tell me about it. I would
like to analyze it with Ann's program.

PAF has a relationship calculator in it. You enter any 2 people and the
program displays the closest relationship between the 2 and their common
ancestor. It tracks out to 10th cousins and as many generations removed as
necessary. If you punch the function button again, it displays the next
closest relationship, and so on, and so on. Most people descended from old
Årdal are related in many ways. I found one person who is related to me 368
different ways!

I do not think this phenomenon is limited to Årdal. I think that it exists
to a large degree in all the kommunes in Norway, at least those of western
Norway. Årdal was particularily remote, but there were a lot of other places
that weren't exactly on the Interstate. I think the real key to it is that
people didn't move around in past centuries. They tended to say put and
marry those from the local area.

I don't even think this is a Norwegian or any other national phenomenon. I
think it applies to most places in the last century and earlier. Ann Turner
reported to me that she and some others are building a data base of all of
the people who lived in some county in Kentucky. They are finding much
larger trees of extended families than they expected. Remember, when you
have 2 families with 100 people each and any 2 people intermarry, you have
one family with 200 people in it, and so on, and so on. Carrying this to the
end, I think everybody winds up being related to everybody. I find this
disturbing because there are people I definately do not want to be related
to.

The message is that if you really start digging around in your kommune of
choice, don't be surprised to find lots more cousins than you thought
possible. You will probably be related some way to almost everyone. So your
extended family tree can be as big as you have time to fertilize it with new
lines.

All this thinking has given me a headache and the thought that I might be
related to a couple of people I know is making me nauseous. By now many of
you may also have a headache and fell nauseous for different reasons, so I
will stop.

As usual this got longer than I planned.

Neil

This thread: