52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks – Week 37 Mistake

All of us make mistakes on a regular basis. I made a whopper when I first began doing genealogy. It was based on an assumption and proved that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing!

Grandfather Adolph H Hansen

I was researching my father’s Norwegian line and knew about the patronymic naming system so I made the assumption that the father of my great-grandfather Adolf Hansen was Hans [  ] and entered it as such in my family tree. Several years later as I became a more experienced genealogist and learned to evaluate records more critically, I discovered that my ancestors no longer used the patronymic system when my great-grandfather was born in Oslo in 1852. The actual name of his father was Martin Hansen!

By now others had copied my tree with Hans as the father and it was that way on ancestry.com, familysearch.org and wikitree among others. How could I fix it? It was my original error and now it had multiplied over and over. 

Great-grandfather Adolf Hansen b 1852
Christened Johannes Adolf Waldemer Hansen
son of Martin Hansen b 1827

After hearing Cyndi Ingle's talk on “Copy and Paste Genealogy”, I decided to implement one of the suggested solutions! I wrote and published a blog post detailing the records that led to the correct answer to Adolf’s correct parentage.

After publishing the blog post, I have attached a link to it in my tree at ancestry.com and just hope for the best! Here is the link. http://hangingwithdonna.blogspot.com/search?q=Martin+Hansen