Family History Writing Challenge Day 4: Skaar-Eiesland and Bruskeland-Eiesland

I know this throws the alphabetical order out of line a little bit but this chapter was originally a part of another chapter (which was called Eiesland) and in light of new info and complicated Norwegian names, I've decided to give this family their own chapter. This also means I'll have more than 28 chapters to cover so I'll also be posting both today.

Anyone with Norwegian heritage knows how common patronymic names are - that is, the practice of one's surname being a combination of one's father's Christian name plus a suffix of "sen" (son) or "datter" (daughter). This presented a problem in my family history book of what to call the family as a whole! Each generation had a different surname. I decided to call the family by their farm name, since this is often attributed to their names in records, but this also presented the problem of there being more than one farm in different generations of the family. In this case, there were only two farm names for each chapter so I decided to just use both: Skaar-Eiesland and Bruskeland-Fladen. I have yet to come across more than two farms for the same family but I think if I did, instead of hyphenating three or more names, I'd just go with the most prominent name or two.

Skaar was a farm in the parish (like a township) of Konsmo, in the county now know as Vest-Agder. Eiesland was located in the parish of Lyngdal of the same county. Bruskeland was a farm in Laudal and Fladen was in Lyngdal, both also in Vest-Agder. At the time, the county was called Lister Og Mandal until 1919. The Skaar/Eiesland family married into the Bruskeland-Fladen family before moving to the Mid-West of America in the mid-19th century and marrying into the Friis/Fries family (more on them in a few days).

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