(A note to international visitors)
This Web site is an attempt to create an «Online Bygdebok» for the old rural commune of Solum, Lower Telemark, Norway. A «Bygdebok», for those of you who don't know it, is a peculiar phenomenon of Norway. It's usually a massive, multi-volume work where every farm in the area gets a thorough description, along with a family history of all its known inhabitants through the ages. The place name «Solum» is a dialectal form of «Solheim» meaning «sunny home», and variants of the name are found more or less all over Norway. By coincidence, Solum is also a Latin word, meaning soil. That may be considered fitting as well, as the vast majority of our ancestors indeed had a close connection to the soil. However, Solum is also the immediate neighbour of the towns of Skien and Porsgrunn. Since the 18th century, the central area has been gradually transformed into what is today an integral, mostly suburban, part of the Grenland conurbation. The more peripheral parts Mælum and Kilebygda are still rural, with large tracts of mostly untouched wilderness. In 1964, Solum ceased to exist as a separate administrative unit, and was merged with Skien.
The Norwegian noun «slekt» communicates the concept of «extended family» in which genealogy addicts all over the world love to engross themselves. In a broad sense, it's the set of people that are related to yourself through blood and wedlock. Ultimately, it encompasses all mankind. Thus, «Solumslekt» is a subset of this ultimate extended family, namely the lucky ones with their roots in Solum.
This site is financed, owned, developed, and maintained by the author of this page as a free, non-commercial service for everyone who is interested in genealogy research in the old parish and municipality of Solum during the period 1600-1814. Concerning the time limits, an explanation follows.
The 18th century provides us with a wealth of information for genealogists doing research in Norway. In most parishes, the church records give generous information about the births, marriages, and deaths of the entire population from around 1700. On this Web site, you will find searchable transcripts of the church records of Solum from 1713 to 1814 for baptisms, confirmations, engagements, weddings, burials, and marriages. As we move back through time, the sources become thin and sparse. In the 17th century we may still find a lot of family relationships, highlighted by probates, census enumerations, court records, and tax lists. The time before 1600 is, with very few and precious exceptions, lost to genealogy in Norway. This means, among other things, that you should not accept at face value a pedigree dating back to the Vikings. It would almost certainly not survive the scrutiny of a serious researcher.
Nevertheless, curiosity is a very human trait, and one just can't stop taking guesses. On the border of darkness and oblivion, assertions of relationships progressively become based more on conjecture from temporary and spatial closeness and name similarities than on concrete evidence. Any person who is studying a particular field for any length of time will inevitably conjure up all kinds of assertions. However, those assertions do not always map to reality, and quite often you'll notice that old and seasoned genealogists jump to wrong conclusions based on insufficient data. It's an important thing to consider that conjectures that are based on «time, place, and name» are not carved into stone. I still think that they may be worthy of publishing; albeit as conjecture rather than as fact.
I am drawing the other limit at 1814 because it is an important turning point. In the general Norwegian history it's our Year of Independence, the year in which Norway established its own constitution and government. In genealogical research, it marks a turning point due to the fact that the church records from that year on are standardised and become far more reliable as sources. There's a qualitative difference in doing genealogy research before and after 1814, and I enjoy the intellectual challenge of the former. Besides, even a «geneaholic» has to draw a line somewhere.
I was introduced to the concept of a genealogy database way back in 1997, and immediately became obsessed by it. There's something in the inherent order and clearly defined constraints of a database, combined with an ocean of obscure and disparate information just lying around and crying out for structure, that I can't resist. It's the ultimate jigsaw puzzle, sudoku, and whodunnit rolled into one game. It can even become emotional, as well as providing insights into the mysteries of life and humanity, when we catch glimpses of an individual's fate between the dry facts. And, to the extent that we cite our evidence and document our conclusions in such a way that the steps are retraceable by other researchers, we're actually doing scientific work. In contrast, most of what you find on the Web presented as «genealogy», that doesn't document its sources, is in my opinion just worthless gossip.
After a few months of compiling data in a couple of rather simplistic programs that I soon outgrew, I bought a copy of The Master Genealogist (TMG). I used that until 2005, when finally my own application had reached a production-ready state. For the interested reader, there's a quite detailed technical account of my migration from TMG to the homegrown «Exodus» in the Forays article series. I'll only mention here, for the context, that the presentation software «Slekta(SQL)», was the first stage. By 2002, I had it up and running on this site. That was actually the most difficult part of creating my own genealogy program. The registration routines are extensions to the «Person View» of that application, rewritten for the PostgreSQL database engine running on my Linux workstation. I routinely export the data to the Web site (which of course is running on a Linux server) as soon as I have a significant number of updates. Thus, from end to end, the data is now entirely under my own control in an Open Source environment. I have kept the flexible «Event Model» of TMG, and then added some more flexibility of my own invention. The most significant difference from the TMG model, is my reworking of the source apparatus into a hierarchical structure. This means that instead of the ca. 300 sources that I had trouble handling in TMG, I'm now handling 20,000 sources with ease. That is because they are organized in their own «family tree», where you only see a group of closely related sources (ie. sharing the same initial string) at a time. You can climb around in the tree just like you navigate through a family in your average genealogy program by clicking on parents, children and even siblings. It's growing all the time, as I'm now adding transcripts of the original sources to nearly every citation.
With this self-developed production/storage/presentation chain, I have ultimately reached the goal that I set for myself from the day that I started presenting my data on the Web: A system that is providing ample room for my own comments and discussions, as well as seamless use of hypertext linking to other persons and online resources. The extremely flexible source apparatus, allowing for a virtually unlimited level of details within a strictly normalized structure, came as an unexpected and delightful bonus.
The order and transparency does however come with a price. Now, there's no way to hide from sloppy documentation. As I have not always entered my data in a consistent and orderly manner, I've commited myself to a major cleanup process. There are lots of documentation, explanations, and discussions missing for persons who are just sitting around in the database and who haven't seen a visitor for years. Today, after ten years of learning genealogy research The Hard Way[TM], a lot of my early «documentation» is frankly embarrassing. Therefore, I don't expect the number of persons in the database to grow much until I have raised the quality of documentation for the current contents to an acceptable level.
It is my humble wish that the publication of my personal research data is perceived the way it is intended: As an assistance in your own research, not as a collection of hard facts. As in every other genealogy publication, there's bound to be a profusion of errors here. But, one of the great benefits of publishing on the Web is the feedback from the audience, enabling the compiler to refine the data continually. The discussion on the «Solumslektsforum» is of invaluable help in this process.
The database now covers more than 95% of the persons living in Solum and West side Porsgrunn during the period 1714-1801. The few remaining ones are persons who only lived here a few years before moving on, and some other hard to identify persons. Besides. I have incorporated about half of the persons living in the neighbouring parish to the north, Holla. That's because most of them are closely related to Solum inhabitants, or moving from or to Solum themselves. Further, there are some stray families from other parts of the Grenland / Lower Telemark area with connections to Solum, ie. Bamble, Gjerpen, Drangedal, Sauherad, Hjartdal, and even from Gjerstad in Aust-Agder from where there was a considerable influx of families to the Grenland area in the 18th century.
During the years that I've been working with the genealogy of Solum and its immediate vicinities, I've collected a host of sources, both primary and secondary. My pet project is to make this material, as well as my own interpretations of it, available to the public at large. I feel that private requests for doing lookups is, most of the time, contrary to this goal. It has therefore a low priority with me, as with most seasoned genealogists. Those who want help with lookups are advised to peruse the discussion board «Solumslektsforum» or its excellent sister forum run by Grenland Ættehistorielag.
Some legal details: The textual and visual contents of these pages are in principle my intellectual property. To the extent that the matter may be considered original work, such as my own articles, theories, and discussions, the work is protected by Norwegian and international law. The work is offered freely for any private and non-profit usage, but any commercial exploit of the whole or parts of it without my explicit consent will be considered as an offense. However, I'd be happy to collaborate in any publishing project pertaining to Grenland/Lower Telemark genealogy.
I do everything I can to ensure that these pages are presented as standards-compliant, validating code, as described and recommended by the Web standards organisation W3C. You may verify this for yourself by clicking on the «W3C» icon that you'll usually find in the lower right corner of my pages.
Kirkerud, June 13th 2007
Latest revision
2007-06-13