Leif Biberg Kristensen

Ancestors

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Biography

Leif Biberg Kristensen was born in Norway

Descendant of Jon Jensen Lien and Anne Christensdatter.

Leif Biberg was featured in a Meet Our Members Post on the WikiTree Blog!

I was born in 1952 in the smallish town of Porsgrunn, Norway. I'm now a retired civil servant, having worked for many years with Unix and databases in the IT department of the Norwegian Health and Social Security Insurance administration.

In the years 1987-1990 I studied psychology at the University of Oslo. As my life turned in another direction I never got a degree. But I learned a lot about scientific method, which I try to apply to genealogy by systematic collection of data and rigorous documentation.

Since 1997 I've been a devout genealogist, with making sense of 18th century parish registers ("Kirkebok") and probate protocols ("Skifteprotokoll") as my favourite subject. I'm working with the entire population of the Solum parish in Lower Telemark, Norway during the period c.1660-1840, and lots of collateral research in the neighbouring parishes. I'm almost exclusively using original sources, and I always include full transcripts of the Baptism / Marriage / Burial entries from the parish registers. For Norway, the parish registers include the entire population before 1845, as membership in the Lutheran state church was mandatory.

Where I find a probate, I will usually write down what it says about relationships in the Biography section. It should be mentioned that a Norwegian "probate" (skifte) is a quite different animal from its American counterpart. It was a public affair, and there was generally no will involved. Here's a very good Introduction to Norwegian probate records.

In the Sources sections of my profiles, you will also find embedded links to images of the original documents at the Norwegian Digital Archive ("Digitalarkivet"), thus being able to verify the data for yourself, and even (hopefully) arrive at better conclusions than mine.

I started entering data in a couple of programs that I'd rather not mention, but soon I became a fan of The Master Genealogist (TMG), which I used until 2005, when finally my old laptop running Windows 2000 broke down. Working professionally with Unix, I've never been very impressed by Windows, and by then I had developed my own replacement database application (Yggdrasil) in PostgreSQL and PHP, running on my big, fat, powerful Gentoo Linux workstation. This is still my research / production database environment.

In 2002 I started my own genealogy site "Solumslekt.org". I closed it down in 2019, mostly because of a growing realisation that my own custom software was a dead-end, which I couldn't expect anyone to step up and maintain after me. I'm now transferring my data to WikiTree, as this site to a certain degree appears to be focused on quality rather than quantity. To that end, I wrote a Perl script which will generate a Wiki biography for any person in my database, complete with inline references. That is saving me massive amounts of typing, and I can easily add scores of people whenever I've got the time.

My contributions here on WikiTree are centered around the Solum, Telemark One Place Study, which is a continuation of my old "Solumslekt" web site. I do hope that my data will survive here on WikiTree, and that my rigorous sourcing and cross-linking will protect profiles from being abused by addition of random unsourced or mythical connections. It is also my hope that others will join me and collaborate on the Lower Telemark genealogy, always keeping a decent scientific standard in mind. Documentation is everything.

Remember kids, the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down. -- Adam Savage, Mythbusters

Showcases

Some profiles that i worked a little harder on.

• Gunvor Tollefsdatter (abt.1470-abt.1535). Plain mythbusting. A closer look at the sources tells a different tale.
• Kjeld Tomassen (abt.1624-1705). One of my ancestors. Some try to sweep conflicting evidence under the carpet, others try to make sense of it.
• Jacob Bergan (abt.1580-abt.1660). Another ancestor, where the old advice to "follow the property" bore fruit.
• Marte Christensdatter (1749-1830). Busting a case of "stunt genealogy" in a published work.
• Berte Gundersdatter (1757-1837). Yet another ancestor. The names of two babies were swapped at the baptism. The error took years to uncover.

Orphans

Due to the large numbers involved, most profiles created by me where parents, siblings, spouses, and children have been fully researched will be routinely orphaned. You are welcome to adopt them, but please respect the many years of research behind these profiles, and don't change vital data or add any family members unless they are well documented. Also, I'd love to hear about descendants of my profiles. Please drop me a few words if you're able to connect to one of them.

Useful Links

• Norway Project FAQ
• How to enter Norwegian Names in WikiTree
• Sources for Pre-1700 Profiles in Norway
• Useful Norway Genealogy Resources

Quarterly Statistics

This is a table showing dates, number of imported profiles, differences, and rounded percent of imported profiles over total number of profiles in my own database. As the latter includes many private, unconnected and poorly documented profiles, I don't expect the percentage to ever exceed much more than 85-90. When I have imported all the connected and documentable profiles, probably some time in 2024, I will resume my primary research and continue to add profiles and sources.

The number of profiles include those created by me, and about 500 created by others where I have contributed with my own data. Many of the latter category have been entered into Wikitree by others based on profiles from my old "Solumslekt" site.

Finally, I want to mention that I am working in a continuous revision loop on all these profiles. In the table that links Wikitree IDs with the IDs in my own database there is a timestamp field called "updated_at" which will update automatically whenever I generate or regenerate a biography from my WikiBio script. I will always go to work on the profile with the oldest "updated_at" timestamp. I may also set this timestamp manually if there is nothing to do, but so far there have been so many changes in my way of writing profiles, as well as internal Wikitree changes, that I usually recreate each biography (even if I won't necessarily rewrite the entire bio) every time i return to it within a period of (currently) 15-18 months. My long-term goal is to revisit each profile at least every two years.

Leif Biberg Kristensen 2018-2024

Sources

• First-hand information. Entered by Leif Biberg Kristensen in person.