One of these days, I'll write a few posts about our big trip to Iceland and Denmark back in August. For now, you'll have to be satisfied by the pictures I've been posting on flickr. Which brings me to the point of this post. As I was selecting and editing my photos to post to flickr, I eventually got to our brief stop in Solbjerg.

Solbjerg is on the island of Mors in the Limfjorden. In my last bout of serious Danish genealogy research a few years ago, I found out that my great great grandparents, Heinrich Frederik Ludwig Mohr and Ane Marie Sørensen, were married in Nykøbing on Mors and that Ane Marie was born in Solbjerg. I also settled, once and for all, the question of Ane Marie's maiden name. Or so I thought. If you're not interested in genealogy, stop reading now.

You see, my grandfather's name was Clifford Frandsen Luck Mohr. Frandsen was his mother's maiden name and his father was Thorwald Luck Mohr. Back in Denmark, it was spelled Lÿkke and the story was that it had been Ane Marie's maiden name. For years, I'd recorded her name as Ane Marie Lÿkke. But as I started researching this part of my family, the evidence quickly began to mount that this was not the case. Thorwald's christening certificate, as well as the corresponding record in the Danish church books, gave her name as Ane Marie Sorensen. Then I found a couple of Thorwald's sisters in the California Death Index. Both listed Sorensen in the "mother's maiden name" field. Next up was Ane Marie's death certificate, which listed her father's name as Anders Sorensen. Once I knew to look in Solbjerg, I found her birth record in the church books:

There it was, plain as day: Ane Marie Sørensen. Not Lÿkke. Sørensen. And her father? Søren Andersen. Not quite what her death certificate said, but close. This was in the brief period of time in Denmark when patronymic¹ names were still in use, but only the "male" versions. A generation earlier, she would have been named Ane Marie Sørensdatter. A generation later, Ane Marie Andersen. With that settled, I tried to work my way back a bit further, but I couldn't find her parent's births, nor their marriage. I was getting genealogy burnout, so I set it aside for a while. I had hoped to get some more Danish research done just before our trip, but that never happened.

So that brings us to last week, when I was culling, editing, and captioning photos from our trip. I fired up Reunion to check on Ane Marie's birthdate and a note I'd made about her father's name caught my eye. I thought I'd double-check her birth record and when I did, I noticed something I'd never noticed before:

This is the Parents column of Ane Marie's birth record. It lists her parents as Søren Andersen and Maren Andersdatter, both of Solbjerg. But what's that text right at the beginning of the second line? Lÿk? Could it be short for Lÿkke? Off I went to find out...

Fortunately for me, Denmark's National Archives (Statens Arkiver) has made it very easy to do genealogy research from home. First, there's Arkivalieronline.dk, which has scans of virtually all of the existing churchbooks for every parish in Denmark, from the 1600s through 1950. They're not indexed, so using Arkivalieronline is just like using microfilmed church books: pick the parish and date range, then page through until you find what you want. Arkivalieronline also has scans of Danish census returns (Folketælling) accessible the same way. The other piece of the puzzle is Statens Arkiver's DDD: Dansk Demografisk Database. The DDD contains extracted and indexed census returns, as well as immigrant and emigrant registrations. Best of all, both sites are completely free.

When I last worked on this stuff, the DDD records were woefully incomplete outside of Copenhagen (even now, they're a work in progress). This time around, I searched for "Lykke" and "Lÿkke" in Solbjerg and turned up a Søren Lykke, an Anders Sørensen Lykke and a Søren Andersen Lykke, along with their families. Another search for the same names without the added "Lÿkke" turned up the same households in different census years. Sure enough, Ane Marie Sørensen's father was Søren Andersen Lÿkke. His father was Anders Sørensen Lÿkke and his grandfather was Søren Lÿkke. The census records identified siblings, parents, birthplaces, and ages. Back in Arkivalieronline I was able to find all the related birth and marriage records in the church books and go back three more generations from Ane Marie in just a few hours of work. Arkivalieronline plus DDD is much more useful than either resource alone. Cool!

Of course, the whole purpose of this post is to reveal the mystery of Lÿkke or Lykke². Why did Ane Marie's paternal ancestors use both patronymics and "Lÿkke?" Why didn't she? Well, it turns out the Lÿkke name was passed down from father to first born son. Daughters never took the Lÿkke name, nor did later sons (with one exception³). In this case Lykke is what's called a tilnavn in Danish—a taken or added name. There's no rhyme or reason in the world of added names. They're neither patronyms nor true surnames and their use was unpredictable from generation to generation. Sometimes they would appear for a generation or two and fall out of use again. Other times, they would stick around for generation after generation. What do they mean, though? Who knows! Some added names came from the farm a family worked or the occupation of some ancestor. Some were related to geography or the physical appearance of an ancestor. And some were taken for no apparent reason at all. Maybe they just wanted to imitate the nobility, who had fixed surnames long before the common folk. As for Lÿkke, it's still a mystery. It can be translated as "luck," as it was in my family, but it can also mean "happiness." Maybe old Søren was particularly lucky or perennially happy. There was a noble family in medieval Denmark with the Lykke name; maybe an ancestor of mine worked for the noble Lykkes.

So, it seems my great great grandmother wasn't Ane Marie Lÿkke as we'd thought. On the other hand, Lÿkke was her family name after all.

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1. Patronymic names were once common throughout Western Europe. In Denmark, sons would take the father's name with "-sen" added and daughters would take the father's name with "-datter" added. So Søren Andersen's son would be, say, Hans Sørensen and his daughter Karen Sørensdatter. Patronymics are still used in Iceland. ↩

2. You may notice I'm using Lÿkke in some places and Lykke in others. Spelling was a rather more fluid affair back then and some records include the umlaut and others don't. In modern Danish, the word is spelled Lykke. ↩

3. Ane Marie Sørensen's eldest brother took the name Anders Sørensen Qvist rather than Anders Sørensen Lykke. Qvist was an added name used in their mother's family. Ane Marie's younger brother was Anders Sørensen Lykke. ↩

Let's fire this ol' weblog up and see if she still runs, shall we? What's this? An already-written post waiting in my "drafts" folder? Excellent...

Ah, yes. Suzanne Vega. My freshman year at RPI, I lived in "The Quad." They were the oldest and most run-down dorms on campus (two years later, they would undergo a huge renovation project), but they were also the most centrally-located. Most of the academic buildings were nearby and the Rensselaer Union was right across the street. In the center of The Union is the McNeil Room: not a bad venue for acts too big to be playing in a bar, but too small for the Field House.

I'd already seen a couple concerts there by the time Suzanne Vega rolled into town in March. I'm pretty sure I'd seen BoDeans there as well as Treat Her Right (Mark Sandman's pre-Morphine band). I would have seen They Might Be Giants there, too, but as the sign on the door said, "They Might Be Canceled." And they were.

Oh, but I was supposed to be talking about Suzanne Vega, wasn't I? I honestly have no recollection where I first heard her. I do remember having a cassette of her debut album—an actual pre-recorded store-bought cassette, one of only a couple I ever remember buying. This was before her big breakthrough with "Luka" and "Tom's Diner." The concert was a low-key folkie kinds of affair. Even the smallish venue of the McNeil Room was only about half full, which gave the show an intimate vibe.

Glaciers! Deltas! Dunes! It's Pathological Geomorphology! (via MeFi).

Mmmm... electrons. Tasty, tasty electrons. Hydrogen Wave Function Cookies combine science and food. Yum.

Speaking of food, Cooking Issues—one of my favorite geeky cooking blogs—has done a great two-part primer on Sous-Vide cooking (Part 1, Part 2) with more yet to come. When the Sous Vide Supreme comes down to about half its current price, I'll jump.

My DC-area readers probably already saw this, but the Washington Post Magazine did a big feature on the 9:30 Club recently. Ah, memories... (via MeFi)

Hey Paul, Hey Paul, Hey Paul, Let's Have A Ball. Merlin Mann posted a great video the other day of Pixies playing "Gigantic" live. I miss the old Pixies (as opposed to, you know, the old Pixies). Come to think of it, though, one thing I always loved about them was that they looked like me and people I knew. They weren't hipsters or Huge Rock Stars, just regular people.

I vaguely remember posting this once before, but I can't find it at the moment... It's worth another link, anyway: In the Event That You Have Accidentally Swallowed the Higgs Boson. "Just choose from the array of probable outcomes that will manifest themselves upon your decision to perform surgery, and make the one most favourable to yourself into reality."

Wondering how best to brew your next cup of coffee? Brew Methods has you covered (via cleanhotdry).

A couple recent searches for old maps have led me to the David Rumsey Map Collection. The collection "has over 22,000 maps and images online." All high-res and free.

How big (and empty) is our solar system? A little perspective always helps. Or perhaps you'd prefer The Known Universe. It's like an astronomically accurate Powers of Ten (via Kottke).

DIY Film: "Plastic and goop go in one end and camera film comes out the other end. This is not a trivial undertaking." (via Boing Boing)

Who wouldn't want a 7.5 hour HD video of a train ride through Norway? Get your copy here. It's only 22 GB. Or you could go for the original HD file, which weighs in at 246 GB. (via Boing Boing)

The campaign against The Elements of Style has begun! None too soon.

This is not a spiral.

Ah 1999. Kosovo, Columbine, Euro, Jar Jar, Dow 10K, Y2K fears, and the toilet-seat clamshell iBook. What a year. It was also the year the US Women's Soccer Team won the FIFA World's Cup.

Back then, Kathy's parents lived just south of Silicon Valley. We had a visit planned that summer and just before we left, Kathy found out that one of the semi-final games of the Women's World Cup was being held at Stanford while we were there. Best of all, the US had just beaten Germany in the quarter finals, so the game would feature the US team against Brazil. She bought three tickets so her sister could go with us and off we flew to California.

As it turns out her sister chose not to go with us, so her mom did instead. On July 4th, we drove over to Palo Alto, fought through the traffic and headed up and up and up into the stands. You might notice the ticket says Row 80. Yeah... 80! We were waaaaaay up at the top of the stands, but at least we were at mid-field.

I thought the game was pretty exciting, though the New York Times described it the next day as "largely uninspired." Maybe it wasn't the greatest game ever, but it was great to just be able to see that team play... Mia Hamm, Michelle Akers, Brandi Chastain, Brianna Scurry. A US women's soccer team full of household names? How strange. Was this how it would be in the new century?

Obviously, the US won the game—Wikipedia tells me it was 2-0—and went on to play China in the final six days later. They won that game, too, when Brandi Chastain scored the winning goal and famously ripped off her shirt in celebration. 1999.

I haven't done one of these in a couple years...

Wow. We took a lot of pictures last year! I had a renewed interest in photography even before the 7D arrived, but the new camera really lit a fire under me. Late in the year, The Daily Shoot came along and threw gas on the fire. Why do I care how many pictures I've taken? Well, I don't per se. But to quote the Daily Shoot site: "Photography is an art and a craft. Getting better at both requires practice—lots of practice."

Last month, I tweeted a link to a very funny YouTube video, the Chrysler Turbo Encabulator. Anyone who has ever had to wade through technical jargon will likely find it funny, but to an engineer like me, it was hilarious.

Today, my dad sent me a link to a very similar video, the Rockwell Retro Encabulator. It seems to be somewhat more recent than the Chrysler version, but other than a few minor changes, the script is substantially identical. Interesting. So which came first, Rockwell or Chrysler? Or was there a Proto Encabulator that predated them both?

Wikipedia to the rescue! It turns out the Chrysler video was created in 1988 and the Rockwell one in 1997. But the term "Turbo Encabulator" and much of the script dates back to at least 1946, when it appeared in a Time Magazine article, Science: For Nofer Trunnions. It appeared again in a General Electric data sheet (PDF) in 1962. The classics never go out of style, do they?

There's not much to go on here. Some mysterious concert at a place called the State Theatre. What could it be? I seem to remember a State Theatre in Albany... did I see a band there? Hmm.

After some thought, it occurred to me that this was a place in Portland (Maine). It was a beautiful old theater on Congress Street that had fallen into disrepair. By the time I moved to Maine in 1989, the place had been subdivided into smaller theaters and was showing porn flicks. Sometime in the early 90s, the theater was purchased by a group of investors and restored to some likeness of its former glory. Which brings me to this stub.

Soon after the theater reopened, we had our first chance to see a show there. Los Lobos were coming to town! What a time to see them, too! They'd just definitively removed themselves from their La Bamba pigeonhole with the release of Kiko. Wow. Kiko. At once rootsy and wildly experimental, it would define their sound for the next couple albums.

Like many of these older concerts, I know I enjoyed it, but I don't remember much of the show itself. I do remember being impressed that a five-member band (or was it six) could be so tight. They could go off on wild tangents and all come back together in perfect sync in a single beat. Many of the Alt bands I was seeing at the time almost reveled in their sloppy wildness (The Replacements and The Pogues come to mind). Los Lobos could be wild without being sloppy. Good Stuff. I'd love to see them again.

Last year, I wrote a weblog post about my discovery of R.E.M. A few months after my eyes were opened, I found out R.E.M. was coming to DC. Actually, I found out the night before the concert. I spent the next day at school trying to convince anyone to go with me to the concert. Despite having all the zeal of a new convert, I didn't have much luck. That afternoon, I was working in the yearbook office—yes, I was on the yearbook staff—still singing the praises of R.E.M. when another staff member came in the room asking "is someone talking about R.E.M. in here?" Bingo. Kelly's older brother had returned from college bearing new music. She was hooked, too. That night, off we went to George Washington University's Smith Center.

We arrived fully expecting the place to be packed, but I guess I wasn't the only one having a hard time convincing friends to come. Smith Center isn't that big (Wikipedia says it holds 5,000) and the general-admission crowd didn't nearly fill the floor, let alone the seats. I'd guess there were no more than about 1000 people there.

The opening band that night was The dB's. They were introduced as "the best band nobody's heard of." They were full of wild energy and jangly guitars and I loved every minute of it. Their "big" album Like This had just come out and it really seemed like they were finally going to break out. Alas, that wasn't to be, but their performance won me over into their small band of loyal fans.

As for R.E.M., can I barely remember their set, but for a feeling I had. I felt like I was watching a door open into a secret new world. Concerts can be like this? It was so different than the slick, organized production that the Billy Joel concert had been. It wasn't really anything new; I'd imagine it's the same feeling people had watching punk for the first time. It sure felt new to me, though. This was gonna be big.