For those that don't know, the title of this post is taken from Doctor Who, when he explains to someone that time isn't this linear thing that always behaves properly; instead it's made of "wibbly, wobbly, timey-wimey stuff." As a genealogist, I've come to realize that surnames are never as set in stone as we'd like to believe. Variations in spelling are so commonplace, that the idea that one's family name was "always" a certain way is almost laughable. Still, I have sometimes gotten in the habit of thinking that, within certain boundaries, I'd figured out most of my family surnames and their histories, at least in recent years. I should have known better.
When my Bergstad ancestors emigrated from Norway in 1847, the name "Bergstad," the name of the farm they lived on at the time they emigrated to the US, was a part of their emigration record, as you can see below in the entry for Sjur Johannesen Bergstad, which starts on the first line but continues on the second line.
Then on the passenger list coming into the US, the image cuts off part of the name, but you can still see Bergstad there after Sjur Johannesen.
For a long time, the next record I had of Sjur's family was the 1860 US Census, which lists them as Johnson (the Anglicized version of Johannesen), with no mention of Bergstad.
Then Sjur's son Johannes Sjursen was listed in the 1870 US Census as John Shurson, again with no mention of the Bergstad name.
This led me to think that they dropped the Bergstad name after arriving in the US until sometime between 1870 and 1880, as Johannes Sjursen shows up in the 1880 census as John S. Bergstad.
From that point on, they were Bergstads. Or that's how I thought it went, until last week. I went looking for birth or baptism records for Johannes Sjursen Bergstad's oldest children, and I actually found them! First was Sjur Johannesson, born in 1857 in Wisconsin. One of the fun things about Norwegians is the fact that they formed communities here in the US and created their own records in Norwegian - church records, newspapers, all in Norwegian. Sjur's baptism record listed his parents as Johannes Sjursen and Thorbjor Knutsdr.
Just what I expected to find - the patronymic Sjursen surname, and no Bergstad. But then Johannes's second son Knud was born.
In Knud's baptism record, his parents are listed as Johannes Bergstad and Thorbjor Knudsdr. No Sjursen, just Bergstad. This predates the 1860 census record, and shows the family considered and used Bergstad as a surname about a decade after getting to the US, and a couple decades before it became a permanent thing for them. It makes me wonder what they really considered their surname to be - was it the patronymic they would have used in Norway? Was it the Bergstad farm name? Or did it change depending on some internal decision or outside influence? I'll probably never know for sure, but it does serve to remind me that we really need to be open minded when looking for records of our ancestors - we really never know what they were thinking when they did things.
