Find your Norwegian Great-Grandmother on your Smartphone

The Norwegian Archives have made an App available for download onto your iPhone or Android.  The App allows you to search for your ancestors in records before 1910.  I tried it and found several ancestors, mostly in the 1910 census.  They are continuing to improve the records available to search with the App.  It is free.  Make sure you try different spellings of the names you search since records vary quite a bit.  Click here.

Family Tree Thursday

My family tree has several ancestors with estimated dates for events, depending on the determining document at hand.  The goal, however, is always to continue searching for records that provide exact dates of birth, death, etc. and revise any missing or estimated data.  In this post, I will discuss two recent date revisions.

One of the mysteries I wanted to solve for a long time was the exact date my Sicilian great-grandmother, Agrippina Marianna Strano, died.  I guessed she had died somewhere between 1902 and 1912 because my grandfather, Vincenzo Dibennardo, had a sister that was born about two years after him, and he had lived at a religious boarding school during his youth/adolescence.  By reading my grandfather's diary, written during the scholastic year of 1915-1916, I learned he had already spent at least 4 years of his life away from home, among a Salesian order of priests.  This put his mother's death date around 1911.

A few weeks ago, I was finally able to update the death date for Agrippina Strano. Previously, her date looked like her parents' in the picture below -- "Abt. 1911." When I located her death record, I learned that she died in her hometown of Mineo, at Via Sotto Tamburino, number 16, on 13 November 1909. She died two days before my grandfather's ninth birthday.

Agrippina Strano died two days before my grandfather's ninth birthday

Agrippina died in one of these homes seen in the Google "street view" picture below

I also recently made an update on my Swedish line.  My fifth great-grandfather, Petter Olsson, had a year of birth without an exact date and month. 

Thomas Alexius Haugen is my great-grandfather on my paternal line.  Thomas and his father, Emil, were born in Norway.  Emil's father was born in Sweden.  I have traced this line farther than what is shown here, but more precise records need to be found.  As part of the process of finding more precise data and sourcing the tree, I found the birth record for my fifth great-grandfather (below), Petter Olsson.  He was born in Nästegård Farm in Tanum Parish on 13 November 1758.  His parents (not shown in picture above) were Olof Nilsson and Anne Pehrsdotter.  Death date search is next!

Thanks for reading!  I plan on blogging more again, so please look out for future posts.