Part 4
With the 1801 Census, I had my last hint where to find a birth/baptism record of one of my ancestors. Ingebrigt is listed as being 50 years old at the time, so the straightforward approach is to read the parish registers starting a few years prior to 1750 and looking for a few years afterward. I should also say something about the format of the registers, at least as formatted in the 1700s. I refer primarily to searching them for baptism records, but they contain several other kinds of records. Included also are records of betrothals, weddings, confirmations, and burials. The older registers are also organized by year, but with clusters of similar records collected throughout the year. For example, 1750 would start, beginning with a listing of the confirmations for that year. Then there may be two or more pages listing baptisms, starting in January. Then will come a cluster of betrothals, followed immediately by a cluster of weddings, followed by a cluster of burials. Then comes another cluster of baptisms that picks up where the previous set of baptisms left off, and the cycle continues until the year is finished. Because of this structure, when I’m looking for baptism records, I scan a few pages of such records, and then skip over the next few pages of betrothals, etc., until I get to the next cluster of baptisms. An early difficulty in deciphering the parish registers is that the headings on the register pages are unintelligible to me – of course, since I don’t’ speak Norwegian. But I realized at some point that the headings in the 1700s were not in Norwegian – probably because I was trying to translate them using the internet, but wasn’t coming up with matches. I also discovered that the dates assigned to the various entries were based on the church calendar. This made me wonder if the page headings were latin. Eventually, a little history lesson would lead me to the conclusion that the headings were actually most likely Dutch, during a period in Norway’s history in which the country was aligned with Holland.
All this to say that I spent a significant amount of time reading the parish baptism records around 1750 looking for Ingebrigt Erikssen, but could not find any entry for him. This was frustrating and disappointing. I feared that I had finally lost the trail – maybe Ingebrigt was born elsewhere, perhaps even in another county, and at some point in his life moved to the Frøystad farm looking for work. How would I go about finding any other information about him – how could I pick up the trail again? I could search the parish registers of other nearby counties, but this seemed like a maddening proposition. Could it be that he was born in Breim, but his birth/baptism inadvertently not recorded? Maybe his parents didn’t have him baptized for some reason. But as I suggested earlier, up to this point I was scanning the baptism entries, and spending far less time on the other kinds of entries. At some point, I decided I would try going through the register again, very slowly and carefully, looking for any family hints I could find, paying attention even to the other kinds of records.
Finally, one day I found something surprising, and very puzzling. Here's the page I was looking at. I had deciphered the headings that list betrothals ("Trolovelse" - left hand page), and also the headings that list weddings ("Copulations" - the left side of the right hand page). But then there’s a third column on the far right side of the right page, and I didn’t know for sure what that column was for. The heading is written in gothic script, likely a feather pen, and with somewhat ornate first letter that I couldn’t figure out. I had tried online translations into both Norwegian and Latin, but no match. On this particular page, the column was full from the top of the page to the bottom of the page. On the left side of the column were names, and on the right side of the column was a number, followed by some kind of measure. My first assumption is that the measure was a currency, as if this were a record of taxes paid. What I found in this far right column, in records from 1750, was a single name that was familiar – Ingebricht Ericssen Frøystad. This appeared to be a record of the person I was looking for, but why he was listed here, and not in the section for baptisms, was confusing to me. Were these persons participants in the weddings recorded in the column just to the left? Were there fees to be paid for the wedding?
Over some period of time, I deciphered the column incrementally. Perhaps my first significant realization was that the number and the measure recorded was the age of the person listed. This added to my puzzlement, because according to this reading, Ingebricht was 6 years old at the time of the entry, which read “6 aar.” I had previously noted that the census records tend to generalize on ages, but it seemed a bit surprising to find Ingebricht as a 6 year old right around the time I should find the record of his birth/baptism. Based on the census record, Ingebricht should have been born in 1751, so if this is the same Ingebricht, the census is off by as many as 7 years (assuming that this entry in 1750 is more accurate).
Another realization I made about this column was that Ingebright was not the only Froystad listed here. The two entries immediately beneath Ingebricht read “Kari Ericsdatter ibid. – 4 aar,” and Anne Ericsdatter ibid. – 2 aar.” The use of “ibid” eliminates the necessity of copying the farm name numerous times. So I now have, in 1750, a record of Ingebricht as a 6 year old listed along with his 4 year old and 2 year old sister.
The final piece of the puzzle was the meaning of the column, and it was rather shocking. I eventually concluded that the first letter I had so much difficulty deciphering was a “G,” and the column reads something like “Grav – foestelse. This is a record of burials. I compared the column with burial listings on other pages, and noticed that the list of burials found here is different. The lists are usually more sparse, with a few older people, and a few very young people. This page that includes Ingebricht and his sisters is full. There are also numerous instances of several people in a household being buried at the same time – often between the ages of 1 and 13. This appears to be some kind of epidemic that took the lives of many in Breim – quite possibly Smallpox, but could easily be any of a myriad of diseases. The previous listing in the parish register of burials began to show an increase of the number of burials of multiple young persons per household, and the trend continued through the following listing. The year 1750 is closed out in the Gloppen parish register with an extra page needed to list all the burials.
So if a 6 year old Ingebricht Ericssen Froystad died in Breim in 1750, how is it that Ingebricht Ericssen Froystad appears in the 1801 census as a 50 year old? My first move at this point was to look for his baptism record in the years around 1744, but again – no such record, which was very frustrating. However, I did find the baptism records for Ingebricht’s sisters, Kari (born in 1746) and Anne (born in 1748). These baptism entries include the names of both parents – Eric Ingebrichtsen Froystad and Anne Jacobsdatter. Figuring that Ingebrigt could have been their first son, I looked for their wedding record around 1743. This would lead to another surprise.
I did find the betrothal and wedding record for the couple in 1743. Anne is from the Schindloe farm (sometimes Skinlo), which is located in Breim. What was unexpected is that Eric is listed as Eric Ingebrichtsen Ryg – not Froystad. Ryg (sometimes Rygg) is a farm in Breim that is located directly across Breimsvatnet from where Froystad is located, such that the fastest route between the two would be by boat. Based on this find, it is likely that Eric is the first of my ancestors to have been born on a different farm in Breim, and moved to Froystad shortly after his marriage to Anne. Presumably, the first thought is that Eric is from the Ryg farm, and in my searches for Eric’s baptism record, I should expect to find his father to be Ingebricht Ryg. But with no census to help, I don’t know how old Eric is, and what year to start looking. I had read somewhere that the average age that men were married in farm communities in Norway was around 30 years old –which was surprising by itself. But certainly one could expect that there were exceptions. It isn’t inconceivable that he could have been 18 years old when married – or 35, or 40. Having spent so much time scanning periods in the registers of 4 years at a time looking for familiar names, the idea of having to cover a span of 22 years seemed daunting.
But there was still the question of the birth of their son Ingebricht, whose birth record I never did find – either one. I certainly don’t understand the omission of a birth/baptism record in 1744. It may be easier to imagine the omission of the 1751 birth/baptism record, particularly if he was born shortly after the outbreak of some epidemic. Anne may have been pregnant with a son at the time when their three children died in 1750, and she may have wanted to avoid places of public gatherings, (like a church) which may have been one way the epidemic spread. It seems clear that with the death of their first son Ingebricht in 1750, they would now choose to name their next son Ingebricht as might be appropriate since he would be the inheritor of the farm. Although I have no baptism record to prove this, it seems that the best way to explain the existence of a 50 year old Ingebricht in the 1801 census is that Eric and Anne gave birth to him about 1751. At first I was uncomfortable with relying on this assumption – until I found the 1753 record of the baptism of Kari Ericsdatter to Eric Froystad and Anne Jacobsdatter. Kari is the name of their first daughter born in 1746, and who died in 1750, so the fact that they gave the name Kari to their first daughter born after 1750 Kari suggests that they wanted to keep the same naming conventions for their new children - the oldest son should be named Ingebrigt, and the oldest daughter should be named Kari.
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