Customers Gamma GenoPro version: 3.0.1.4
Last Login: Wednesday, November 24, 2021
Posts: 249,
Visits: 781
|
...in part to research my maternal grandmother's ancestors, and was incredibly successful in that regard (and had a great vacation in every other respect). My mom had been wanting to go back, but didn't want to travel alone, so she offered to pay my way. This was by far the most rewarding vacation I have ever taken. Nearly everybody in Iceland, except for a few of the elders, speaks English as well as Icelandic now, but I have mixed feelings about the booming tourism industry there. Things have changed greatly just in the decade or so since my mom's first visit.
For those who may not be aware, Icelanders are one of the most tightly-knit societies in the world with respect to genealogy, in large part because of the nation's isolation. An article from The New Yorker by Michael Specter (linked to here) is mostly concerned with the scientific side of genetics, but it makes a very interesting observation: "It takes an amateur genealogist with a five-hundred-dollar computer about three minutes to show how any two Icelanders are related."
This is mostly true. The problem is that the genealogist must have full access to islendingabok.is, which means that said genealogist must be an Icelandic citizen. I can fully appreciate the privacy concerns, but this lack of access makes it nearly impossible for descendants of Icelandic emigrants to trace their ancestry unless the family kept detailed records of their own, and in the case of my Icelandic great-grandparents, particularly my great-grandmother, they were leaving a hard life for something they hoped to be better in a new country. As a result, my great-grandmother passed along nothing of her past (likely because the records that I found suggest that she may have been illegitimate), and both of my great-grandparents refused to teach their daughters Icelandic ("we are in Canada now; our children will speak English"; this was common among many immigrants to both Canada and the U.S. in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I believe to the detriment of both nations); this is probably the greatest loss, as Icelandic is an extremely difficult language for adults to learn from scratch; I am, however, intending to persevere in this.
I began my search at the Icelandic Emigration Centre in Hofsós, a small town (even by Icelandic standards) on the northern coast of Iceland, but it was complicated by the fact that my great-grandmother had been fostered (a common practice in Norse society for centuries, but in her case it was closer to a full adoption, and such things were traditionally rarely formalized) and I had nothing more than her name, patronymic (Icelanders still do not have surnames, except for a few families, and the practice of taking a family surname has now been banned), and a pair of names that I *suspected* were those of her birth parents. The Emigration Centre came up empty, probably mostly because we didn't know even the year of her emigration, let alone the exact date. The director of the Centre suggested that I try the National Archives (as we were headed south to the capital Reykjavík for the remainder of our vacation anyway).
At the National Archives, I was assisted by a very helpful young woman who was able to confirm the names of my great-grandmother's birth parents and birthdate from the church records (in most cases, the records are photocopies bound into books, as the original documents are in very poor condition), trace their ancestors back several generations in the archives, and provide me with copies of those documents. From my earlier work and existing documentation on my great-grandfather's line, she was able to establish a common ancestor between us on my great-grandfather's side, whose ancestry I *was* able to trace back to the original settlers and earlier in many branches before leaving North America (and to confirm this work at both the Emigration Centre and the National Archives). Using this, she was able to use islendingabok.is to trace my great-grandmother's ancestors back to the twelfth century. I have not yet integrated this into my existing family tree; I just got back home eighteen hours ago, and I slept for more than half of that, but I wanted to share my story while it was still fresh in my mind. Hopefully this will help other researchers. I urge them to try the Emigration Centre first, as my ancestral circumstances were somewhat unusual in that my great-grandmother had cut off all ties to her biological ancestors at an early age, and the people at the Emigration Centre are very knowledgeable and helpful.
(Minor edits made for clarity after re-reading the post four days later.)
GenoPro: Best. Genealogy. Software. Ever.
Tags:
Edited: Wednesday, August 10, 2016 by
Jakk
|