Anbytarforum - a powerful service that fill us with some fear

Anbytarforum is a forum for genealogists organized by Rötter. Anbytarforum is divided into a number of different departments and have very strict rules. Warning! Read them and follow them! For a beginner, it can be tricky! A common mistake we make is to ask the wrong things in the wrong place. Then, immediately rapped on the knuckles - not always with a particular pedagogical finesse.

For instance, if we are interested in the family Svinhufvud we might be in trouble. The family occurs namely in three different locations on Anbytarforum, namely under Other families, Under Introduced Nobility (Introducerad Adel) and under Not Introduced Nobility (Icke introducerad adel). Nowadays we know that they are all related in some way but dammed is that stupid beginner who asks a question in the wrong place. Not just the monitor of the page comes forward, but also a number of advocates of law and order quickly addresses the ignorant beginner of the fatal mistake. Talk about feeling as an idiot!

The list of flagellation on Anbytarforum could be made quite long, but to dwell on it becomes so boring. Not so long ago, however I found a real good thing. It was a very animated discussion whether to spell the surnames contemporary as they did at the time or if we had to normalize ie. choose a spelling as we will consistently follow through the years. To discuss different approaches to the sources are really good but the discussion developed to affect the personality characteristics of the persons who went far beyond genealogy research. The worst thing one can do is to suggest that one might be related to a significant person without having strong scientific evidence. As a beginner and enthusiast maybe you think you can ask a simple question whether such a relationship could be possible, but then you are completely wrong out there. You might think you should get a polite "no, it's not for the following reasons ...", but not. The naive beginner have to be put in place vigorously! Anyway, I have not myself been affected, but suffered with all the happy beginners who have experienced this. Hope they have not stopped with their genealogy research, but continues and becomes more tolerant than some others. As a professional researcher, I have quite difficult to understand the views of fundamentalism that I have encountered in Anbytarforum.

Anbytarforum is a treasure cave of knowledge. It is often here you get your first hit when you browse the web for an ancestor. Often it gives you valuable contacts with other very helpful genealogists and then you have to put up with the few "Messerschmitts" contained. Search regularly for your ancestors on Anbytarforum to keep up to date with new knowledge that you would otherwise miss. A good way I've found is to add the word "genealogy" to your search. Then you can be sure to find all instances of what you are looking for from Anbytarforum.
But - keep a low profile and be humble!

To be honest Anbytarforum lately have tried to do something about its bad reputation and are now more conscious about the debate climate. I have however found out throughout the last years that there are quite a few genealogists who "knows better" than the rest of us and therefore pop up everywhere and give themselves right to teach us idiots better.

/This text was first published in January 2007 and is now updated/

How I started with genealogy

As I previously told it was poor with relatives on my father's side since he was born in a home for single mothers an was afterwards left by the authoroties to different farmers for upbringing. My father has written some very interesting stories on this. My grandmother, whom I knew who she was, but had very little contact with died in 1996 in old age. She refused until her death to reveal who my grandfather was. Some years later, I received of her brother - my fathers uncle - a copy of a hand-written family tree made around 1905. It was a tree of my grandmother's mother's side and had stated births and deaths of people but had very few surnames. The tree stretched back to a "Bergsman", which is a mine owner, in Ljusnarsberg in late 18th century. Anyway - I rooled the tree an had soon forgotten about it.

The same year as my grandmother died, in time for my father's 75th birthday, he received a telephone call from a woman claiming to be his half sister and that he also had half brother. Since their father's death they had known about my fatgers existance, but not considered it appropriate to reveal anything until his mother died. So suddenly I had a relative on my father´s side, which was pretty exciting. My new aunt, who were of teh same age as me, gave my father a bunch of old pictures of her father and some documents about the family ancestors. My father put this away in a boxs somewhere.

Nearly ten years passed and the end of 2005, I found the old roll with the family tree and the Bergsman´s family. I started studying it and found that the top was: 'Erik Matsson from Hörken, Bergsman (Mine Owner), resident on Stråtgården in Ljusnarbergs Parish, comming from a Finnish ancestor from the 1600s, a certain Peder Persson Ossmi according to Ljusnarsbergs chronicle from 1607. Married to Kristina Katarina Hansdotter from Kyrkbacken Klastorp in Ljusnarsbergs Parish, Örebro län. Eriks in all 12 children were recorded and their descendants until the early 1900s. This was interesting and since I have had research (not genealogy, however) as my profession for 25 years, I attacked the problem in the only way I knew. I searched on the Internet.

I was mainly interested in going back in time because it was the most exciting to do. Who was he Ossmi? Searches on Ossmi returned no results, but on Osmi. It gave lots of international organizations and companies with OSMI as acronym. Eventually, I wrote Osmi + Ljusnarsberg and Google hit a jackpot. It turned out that several other researchers had been interested in a Osmi in Hörken in Ljusnarsbergs and now I found their messages on Anbytarforum. I will tell you about Anbytarforum later.

The picture above shows my grandmother´s parent´s home, where my father could have been brought up if things had been different

/This text was first published in January 2007/

Genealogy for Dummies

Being inexperienced, ignorant and naive can be tough in many areas, but perhaps particularly to genealogists. One year of experience in genealogy has taught me that it is a good idea not to be ignorant even in the beginning. At the same time, I am completely taken by all the wonderful tools available and all the incredibly enthusiastic people engaged in family research. The first genealogist I came into contact with a very experienced genealogist who devoted much of his life to publishing a newsletter in the area. I found when searching on the web that he has produced information on an alleged relative of me in the 1600s. (Just a lucky stroke because I did not know A BIT on how to do). Anyway he lived in my neck of the woods so I called him and he immediately invited me home to talk. This incredibly knowledgeable and nice person spent over two hours for me and gave me all the issues he had left of his newsletter, and extracts from his database concerning my relatives. When we said goodbye he said: "Take it easy with family research. Remember that there are other things in life. It is easy to overdo it, so you forsaken everything else. So weird people I have met among genealogists are not common anywhere else." During my first year as genealogists I have realize that he was really right. At least my wife thinks that I am a bit one-sided in my interests and could be a little more social at times and I have encountered quite fundamentalist people during my travels on the web. Above all, I have as a novice felt quite lost among all the "besserwissers" I have encountered at various genealogists-sites.

I therefore wish to share my thoughts and experiences - and they are not very advanced - with you who are in the same situation I was a year ago, ie. total ignorance about the most basic of family research. I was so ignorant that I did not even understand beginner instructions in the most popular books or on the various genealogists-sites on the web.

For you to understand my deep ignorance, I can tell - though I blush with shame - that I had not a clue what proband meant or clearly understood the difference between ancestors and descendants, let alone could interpret the relationship of a tree numbered with Kekules' system. Now I have at least taught me enough to make jokes and write about it.

For those who expect advanced advice like those you may find in countless books on the subject will be disappointed. For those who wish to hear about ordeales from a total beginner and get answers to questions so stupid that a serious genealogists or primer on the subject would never deal with them, it may be useful and perhaps a good time, to follow my comments.

/This text was first published in January 2007/