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I have to find a balance between producing new presentations for Brigham Young University Family History Library webinars and writing. These presentations are gobbling up a huge amount of time. Not that I am complaining at all. I think it is just a transition from one media format to another.
This particular video is high in data density. But as I review the last few videos we have uploaded, I see a lot of really high density topics. Compared to the usual YouTube offerings, our viewing numbers are not spectacular, but considering the small number of genealogists who are into the online community, we are gratified with the response we have had so far. Thanks for watching our videos and you can expect a lot more in the future. Remember to subscribe to our YouTube Channel. BYU Family History Library YouTube Channel.
Thanks again for these videos. This one I will definitely keep in mind for sharing with others that really need to see it.
ReplyDeleteYour place name example of “O. Berg Hjertum, G-o-BH, Swdn” brought back fond memories of working through all the family group sheets I inherited from my great-aunt Myrtle who was the family genealogist for my mother’s side of the family. Seeing such always reminds me that what we insist as standard best practice today might look just as strange in 50 years as these old standard place name conventions do today. I have always wondered who in authority declared that an appropriate or required abbreviation for a place name was to drop all the vowels then drop all unnecessary consonants.
But beside that, I just wanted to answer for you the remaining question you had about this place name so you can go back and correct it completely. As you have determined that “Hjertum” is actually the parish “Hjärtum,” that must mean that “O. Berg” was the farm name.
Berg would be a very common farm name in Sweden. I would suspect that almost any parish would have at least one Berg farm. The O. preceding the name of a Swedish farm would almost certainly stand for either Öfra or Östra, that is, Upper, or East.
Looking in one of the later Swedish clerical surveys that includes a farm index, there is indeed an Östra Berg farm in Hjärtum. As I would have expected, there is also a Västra (West) Berg.
I took a quick look in the parish register and there is a birth recorded on 21 February in 1743 for a Swen Torstensson (According to the extraction record for it. I’d have to stare at the handwriting for awhile to convince myself that is the actual spelling in the record). The handwriting is difficult, however, the farm name starts with Ö and certainly could be Östra Berg if you turn your head to the side and squint.
(As a final side note, on Family Search if you do a place name search for Hjärtum in the extracted Swedish parish records for 1743, you don’t get any matches at all. If you search for Hjertum, you get 50 matches. The records were all extracted with a non-Swedish version of the place name but the search routine does not recognize them as being the same place. Just another complication.)