My Norwegian maternal grandparents, Ben and Anna Bendiksen, were related to each other through my 4x great-grandparents, Bonde Sivertsen and Ane Marta Olsdatter, so it made sense to place Bonde and Ane at the top of this particular research tree and work down through both of their daughters, Elen Oline Bondesdatter and Anne Sophia Bondesdatter--the great-grandmothers of Ben and Anna Bendiksen, respectively.

Before you read these stories, it may be helpful to know some background about names in Norway. The spelling of first names was not standardized, so Peter, Petter, Peder or Per may very well be the same person recorded by different clerks. The second name, the patronymic (Greek for “father’s name”), is what most people associate with Nordic names. These are the names that end in “-sen” or “-son”, meaning “son of”, thereby indicating who your father was. So, Peder Johnsen is the son of John. His sister will be called Johnsdatter (John’s daughter), and his son will be called Pedersen. Upon arrival in the States, this would commonly have been changed to Petersen or Peterson. Two Petersens are therefore not necessarily related, they both just happened to have a father named Peter. People would also include a farm name. As with the patronymics, these were not names in the modern sense. They were more or less an address. If you moved, the name changed. If Peder moved from the Berg farm to the Vik farm, he would be known as Peder Johnsen Vik, or some variant spelling, from then on. In the last decades of the 1800s, two new patterns emerged. One was a radical change: A married woman could take her husband’s patronymic. The other new pattern was this: The children got their father’s last name instead of a real patronymic. But in the transition period that lasted until 1923, there were old and new patterns side by side, even inside families. In 1923, it was ordered by law that each family should have a hereditary last name and only ONE last name. Some families took a patronymic, others a farm name, and some kept the old hereditary names.