Norwegian Location Category Structure

Profile managers: Leif Biberg Kristensen [send private message] and Norway Project WikiTree [send private message]

Coordinated by the Norway project

Norwegian Locations Categorisation

NOTE: This page was formerly named "Categorizing Norwegian Parishes". As of 19 April 2019, in accordance with changed policy, and combined with a major reworking of the page to reflect the current policy, it has been renamed to "Norwegian Location Category Structure".

The Norway Project held a related Norwegian location categorisation discussion (linked here).

To quote the December 2018 close of the discussion, the conclusion was:

"...in the WikiTree Norway Project, we have reached a consensus regarding Norwegian place names on the following form:

• Category:Norway
• Category:County, Norway (this is how a county/fylke is already named)
• Category:Parish/Municipality, County, Norway (old pattern is Category:Municipality, Norway)
• Category:Farm, Parish/Municipality, County, Norway (there has so far been little subcategorization at this level)

Background

The parishes ("prestegjeld" in Norwegian) constitute the original basic administrative units of Norway. Their origins are ancient and mostly undocumented, and may in many cases have their roots in pre-Christian times. Their sizes were primarily based on the number of people that a pastor ("prest") might be able to serve in a reasonable way, and their borders mostly follow natural topological boundaries.

In 1838, the "formannskapsdistrikt" law was passed in Norway, which simply required that every parish formed its own local governmental unit, partially governed by a locally elected board. In 1853 the civil municipalities ("kommuner") were established, sharing the names and borders of the ancient ecclesiastical parishes. Thus, a civil administration emerged on top of the parish structure and eventually transformed it into a new concept, and the "kommune" (municipality) in time replaced the ancient "prestegjeld" (parish) as the primary local home ground in people's minds.

As an ongoing process, stretching far back in time, parishes and (later) municipalities have been divided and sometimes merged. Peak municipality fragmentation was reached around 1930 with 747 municipalities. In the 1960s there was a major reorganisation of the municipal structure, and the number of municipalities was greatly reduced.

The main source for genealogy in Norway is the parish registers. The clergy has been keeping records of births, baptisms, confirmations, marriages, deaths, and burials for several hundred years. Most parishes have records beginning in the early 18th century, Some go back to the late 17th century.

The Norwegian National Archives through its subsidiary Digitalarkivet has scanned most of the parish registers and presents them free of charge, and they may be linked to with reference information. A few books are transcribed and searchable.

The Norwegian Digital Archives also contain other records relevant to genealogy. They are also organized by parishes. These are Censuses, Emigration records, Probate records, Seamen rolls and military rolls, School records, Health care records, Poverty matters, Accounts and tax lists, Deed registration records, Landed property tax records, Insurance records, Legal proceedings and sanctions and Clerical archives. It varies which parishes have which records. The available sources relevant for Norwegian genealogy should eventually be described on a separate page.

Implementation

The categorisation of Norwegian locations started out with a poorly defined concept of "locations" such as they are found on eg. Wikipedia, and were created on an ad hoc basis. This works as long as there are no name collisions, but a place name like "Vang, Norway" is ambiguous. Is it Vang in Hedmark, or Vang in Oppland? To avoid confusion, it has been decided to always include the county name and the country name; thus the two "locations" above are now defined as "Vang, Hedmark, Norway" and "Vang, Oppland, Norway" respectively. This is a clear and unambiguous standard, with no risk of polluting the common namespace.

The term "location" as used in the previous paragraph also needs clarification. For our purpose, there are two main sources that define and describe all the administrative units we need to cover the subject of Norwegian locations:

• On the ecclesiastical side, the History of Parishes (Historikk for prestegjeld og sogn) at the Norwegian National Archive's Web site gives a comprehensive survey of the history of Norwegian parishes on a county-by-county basis.

• On the civil side, Wikipedia's list of municpality numbers of Norway cover every municipality which have ever existed.

Those two sources are used to set up the new place category structure of Norway. In principle, every item of both lists, whether it is a former/present parish or municipality or both, should have its own entry in the structure. (A preliminary line should probably be drawn excluding the most recent municipality merges, say after 1980.) As the vast majority of the administrative units on both sides share the same names and the same borders, there is no need to differentiate between them in the name structure. However, every parish/municipality category should contain a description of its historic/present ecclesiastical/civil status, and a short history (less than 100 words) of significant splits and merges. It should also contain a link to the corresponding Wikipedia article, and link(s) to the parish records at Digitalarkivet. To see how this is done, see for instance the two "Vang" categories linked above.

This approach avoids the duplication of structures that the original, and now abandoned, idea of "Categorising Norwegian Parishes" implied. The old and obsolete "xxx Parish" and "xxx, Norway" location categories should be emptied and deleted as they are replaced by categories on the current standard.

The Norway Project hopes to finish the re-categorisation on the Parish/Municipality level before the end of 2019. Further subdivision is not considered the Project's responsibility, and will be left to the individual researcher.