How do i Find any information if the courthouse burned down....

Question

Minnie Amunson's birth records (and I assume all records) were burned down in Norway.  We have no information about her at all.

Comments

Suggest you directly contact the leader or coordinator for Norway Project. If they are unable to help, Norway has, I believe, a national repository which may be able to suggest alternative records which may contain some of the information which you seek.

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Great, I'll do that! Thanks!

Answer 1

Why do you say that her birth record burned down in Norway? Most birth records from this time period in Norway have survived.

Also, where did her birth/death dates on her profile come from? Ontario death records are available online at Ancestry, but I can't find a death record for her there.

I did find what is almost certainly her baptism record: "Mina", born 10 Oct 1879 in Nordre Land, Oppland, daughter of Mikkel Amundsen and Andrea Andreasdatter (note: in other Norway records, her mother's name is written as Anne/Anna not Andrea):

• Baptism for Mina
• Mikkel & Anna in the 1875 census in Nordre Land
• Baptism for sister Anna Maria (born 27 Jul 1873 in Nordre Land)
• Baptism for brother Kristian Martin (born 8 Sep 1876 in Nordre Land)
• Probably Mina in the 1891 census, a lodger in the household of Andreas Hansen & Agnete Andreasdatter (a possible aunt?). Census taken 1 Jan 1891.
• Mina's emigration, departing from Oslo on 1 May 1891 on the ship Thingvalla. These are clearly her other family members travelling with her: emigration for mother Anne, emigration for sister Anna, emigration for brother Kristian.
• Mina's arrival in New York with her family (Ancestry transcribes the arrival date as 18 May 1891). Their destination was Pomeroy, Iowa.
• Mina's sister Anna Marie in the FamilySearch tree, she married Ole Nelson in 1893 in Pocahontas, Iowa. Her widowed father "Mike" was listed with her in the 1900 census. 

Considering how her daughter Sybil was living with her grandparents in the 1910 census, I would suspect that Minnie died before 1910. Sybil's father Perry also seems to have remarried to Maude Irene (Richards) Eberhardt by 1920.

• Perry's death record (5 Dec 1950 in New Rockford, North Dakota)
• Maude's death record (2 Oct 1963 in Maddock)
• Maude's memorial on Find A Grave
• Perry and Maude in the 1920 census

Edit to add:

• Marriage record for Mina's parents (26 Dec 1872 in Nordre Land). It looks like Michal's farm name was Trofterud and Anne's farm name was Erstad.

Comments

Wow, Thank you so much for assisting in my research!  IS it safe to assume these findings are the same person I am talking about?  I notice that her name on documents is Mina, though I suspected "Minnie" was a nickname or Americanized version of her real name.

My family will be very pleased to hear about these findings.  Is it possible to find a translator for these documents?

Edit:  Is Mina's mothers legal name Anne or Andrea?

Again, thank you so much for all you have done!

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Part 2:

I have heard from family members that the courthouse was burned down containing all her information.  At the time, I had no info about her, I eventually found a source on FamilySearch, but even that wasnt concrete enough.  I believe a WikiTree user unknowingly came in and changed all the info, I see he changed Minnie's profile as well.

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Yes, I’m confident that Mina is the same person as Minnie. Her parents are named in her marriage record, and she emigrated with her family to Iowa, and her sister married in the same county that she did. It was common for immigrants to anglicize their names.

Since the name Andrea only appears in one record I found, it was probably just a mistake from the parish priest. I would put Anne or Anna for her proper name. Also, legal spellings of names weren’t really a thing in this time period, it was common for names to be spelled a few different ways.

Maybe your family was referring to a courthouse fire in Iowa? I think it is more of an American thing to archive records in courthouses.

You can make a new G2G post asking for a translation (make sure you tag “Norway”). Or, there is a Norwegian Genealogy group on Facebook that has members who can help with translation. (I only know a few words)

Hope that helps!

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That's amazing to hear.  I just spoke to some family and you are right, the courthouse fire was indeed in Iowa, it contained her daughter (My great great grandma) Sybil's birth certificate.

I do have one question.  How did you find all of this information?  I understand how you found her parents records and Minnie/Mina's records; but, how did you find out who she travelled with?  How do you know she had a sister?  does she have any more family members that cam to the U.S. or stayed in Norway?

Again, thank you so much for all you have done.  I was prepared to leave this as a brickwall, but decided to pick back up on it!

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From Minne's marriage record, her parent's names were listed as Michael Amenson and Anna Anderson. In the Digitalarkivet website, you can do a detailed person search so I used that to find records with parents with these names. I figured the actual Norwegian names might be a little different, so I used wildcards, chose role father, entered the mother's details in the "related person" fields, and specified the event range for the approximate years I was looking for. That lead me to the baptism records for Mina's siblings, and then someone had linked this family's records together already in the HBR database (see the HBR button in the top-right of each record page) so that led me to Mina's baptism record and the family's emigration records. The three baptism records are all in the same town with the same parents' names, and they are found emigrating together so they must be siblings. And then her sister's marriage record in Iowa also lists the same parents. I don't think there are any additional children born in Norway besides the three baptisms I listed above, at least not that I could find.

In Mina's immigration record on the Digitalarkivet website, the way the emigration records are set up on the website does not make it obvious who each person travelled with and the website doesn't have the original scanned image. But if you click on the year at the top of the page, it goes to the "summary" page of the record and you can click previous/next to see who the next people in the record are. It is easier to see the family group when looking at the New York passenger list document image, which lists the mother and her three children as one family group (they are listed as wife, girl, boy, and child, all with the same destination location).

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I see!  Thanks for the detailed response.  I was always told that Minnie/Mina travelled without her parents at the age of four with some known relatives.  Is this still the case?

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A few points:

According to the agreed Norwegian WikiTree standard (https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Norway_Project_Naming_Conventions) her LNAB should be her own patronym Mikkelsdatter and not her father's patronym Amundsen.

Her family is found in Ødegaard, Svein-Erik: "Boka om Land, IX, Torpa A", Nordre Land kommune 2002, pp. 344-5, ISBN 82-91525-02-1
https://www.nb.no/items/e3303babb1e31d4c612cabfe6e76387b?page=347

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How do I go about interpreting this data you sent me onto Wikitree?

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To edit a profile, click the green "edit" tab and you can edit the name, birth, and death information here, as well as relationships and the biography/sources.

You can add source citations to the profile either by listing them in the Sources section or by using in-line references after a fact in the biography (use the "C" button in the toolbar to automatically create the <ref> tags). See Help:Sources.

It is pretty simple to cite FamilySearch sources, you can simply click the "copy citation" button on any FamilySearch record page and then paste it into WikiTree. The WikiTree Sourcer browser extension also easily creates source citations for numerous websites (not Digitalarkivet though). I created a page for some suggested source citation formats for the Digitalarkivet website here.

Or if you prefer, I can add the sources to her profile for you.

Since you are the profile manager, you are the only one who can edit Minnie's last name at birth. Her last name should be "Mikkelsdatter" like Aksel mentioned above, and her father Mikkel's last name at birth should be "Amandsen" and her mother Anna's last name at birth should be "Andreasdatter".

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Would you be able to add the sources for me?  I am somewhat new to wikitree and would like to use this page an as example.

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Ok, I've added sources to Minnie's profile and her parent's profiles. Let me know if you have any questions