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Re: Our MØRE, NORWAY connection



Ah! Kristin!!!
    This is great!  Awaiting any Møre information you can come up with especially if it deals with 900-1000 AD.  Any information on changing the ø to oe or ae.  I used to work in the Registration card Dept. of a software company.  When we got orders from Norway, we were advised to use the oe for our database records.  Was that wrong?  What do each of these sound like: Ø Æ  Å  ?  I have seen the Æ
used at the beginning of Saxon names such as Æthelred the unready.  Were the early Saxons when they were over in N. Germany next to Denmark (I think) part of the same linguistic family?  I am told that you can't do this in Finland even though they adopted Swedish characters.  Because if you were to change to oe etc. it would make a whole different word.  I bet a lot of stuff I have picked up along the way is totally wrong. 
 
    I'm also interested in the name of Møre because I have a line of ancestors named Morey.  There were at least 3 families of Morys that arrived in RI around 1630.  One Roger Morey was probably the cousin of Roger Williams who founded RI.  There is a man in New Zealand who just today reported that he has over 21,900 Morey/Mawry,etc. names in his data base.  You can't imagine all the variations there are on this name even to Mohrjie (I think) in The Netherlands.  My theory is that Vikings from that district of Norway carried that name to many many places and it was then spelled as the people of that area would have spelled it.  And consider the name of Murray.  Maybe my ancestor was really a Murray but it was recorded as Morey by an Englishman as was done in the case of John Sinclair/Sinkler of Exeter.
 
    The NZ man thinks most of the names come from the latin root of Mauritus (again, I guess at the spelling) but it meant dark or swarthy and he says it was given to the Moors into Spain.  Probably both ideas have merit.  I think it is interesting that he lives there among the Maori of New Zealand. The Japanese also have the name of Mori to add to the confusion.
    While I'm on the RI subject.  At the 600th gathering, I wrongly corrected Pete Cummings when he mentioned Benedict Arnold as a governor of RI.  Benedict Arnold II was the second governor and followed Roger Williams.  The Benedict Arnold we are familiar with was B. Arnold V.  I decided to read this book on Benedict Arnold that I've had for a year, before I read Saratoga.  I'm guessing that the author James Kirby Martin may be related on my Martin side also.
    As you can tell, by these long messages, I have far too much time on my hands as I recover from larangitis.  I should be down at a certain bank today picketing them because they loaned money to  Castle Superstores that is trying to set up a porn shop very close to several schools.  The people in Oregon are so paranoid about losing their freedom of speech that they have the most lenient laws in the whole country which allow this sort of garbage to come in when the rest of you have had the good sense to make laws to protect your neighborhoods trusting that the U.S. Constitution will always protect you.  So these type of stores cater also to people flying in from other countries and states to load up on trash.
    I guess that about covers things.--Anyone know whether there is a CD with an unabridged dictionary on it?  This is for looking up those obscure words, certainly not to help my spelling, there's no hope for that.
Laurel
-----Original Message-----
From: Kristin A. Hussein <krisawni@internet-zahav.net>
To: sinclair@zilker.net <sinclair@zilker.net>
Date: Tuesday, January 12, 1999 11:20 AM
Subject: Re: Our MØRE, NORWAY connection

Laurel:

Once again - a fountain of information. What are you? A walking encyclopedia?

Anyway, as it happens, I lived for over 10 years in Norway where I worked and earned my BA in the History of Ideas (University of Oslo). I speak, read and write fluent Norwegian. When I first moved there, I lived in a small village (I seem to have a thing for small villages, I now live in a small village in the Galilee) called "Grimo" in the Hardanger district. I also had a "bunad", one of the folk costumes you mentioned, from that region and they are very beautiful indeed. It was custom tailored and complete with silver broach and black, silver buckle shoes. They are somewhat different from the Møre og Romsdal bunads, but still extremely eye-catching. ("og" by the way, means "and")

As far as not finding Møre on the map - and I'm not positive about this - it may be because of the fact that these districts were often named after certain people or families and it is not always the case that there will be a corresponding town with the same name in the same district or otherwise. It is like there is Oregon, but you don't have a town in Oregon (so far as I know) named Oregon, i.e. Oregon, Oregon. I don't know. There very well could be a town called Møre, but I've yet to find it. I have a Norwegian friend of mine looking into it for me and if she can't come up with anything, I can ask other Norwegians I know for information. I did an internet search last night, but didn't come up with anything helpful in this regard.

Anyway, that's all I have time to write for the moment. I've got to get back to work. I am translating a book by a Norwegian author into English as it happens.

Best always,

Kristin Alynn Hussein
Taurus International Word Processing Service
URL:  http://www.angelfire.com/mt/tauruswordprocessing/tauruswp.html

*********************

Spirit One Email wrote:

 First of all, it would surely be great if we could have a real live member of our discussion group from Møre, Norway.  They could probably add much and correct much that I am about to give to you.     A few months back I noticed a beautiful silver broach on a friend's dress and was told that it was from her native area of Norway.  So I told her that our Sinclairs/St. Clairs' ancestor was Rollo s/o Rogenvald of Møre, Romsdal.  She loaned me some books on the folk costumes (Bunads) of Norway in which I found the first good map.  Get out an atlas now and look at Norway--mine just shows Norway.  I wonder whether the Vikings realized that their country would someday look something like a dragon's head or the prow of their ships?     Do you see that there is a long neck running North to South.  Down 2/3 of the way it bulges out into a longish oval like bulge.  Just at this point of getting large--where a necklace would hang, there is a large fiord coming in from the west with a branch even going upwards.  Keep going down the coast which is now sloping SW  a bit and you will see another large fiord.  This fiord cuts right into the center of Møre og Romsdal (does og mean "of " or "and"?)  This district is shaped like a flattened heart with that large fiord the top inward thrust of the heart design.  I can find Romsdal on other maps but never Møre.  Why is that?  What does it signify that it isn't on a map?     The book Sinclairs Family in  by Morrison pg 21 says "Rogenwald, Earl of Maere (since the English typewriter can't accomodate Ø, it is necessary to express it by using "ae" only I really thought it should be "oe".  Anyone know for sure?---)    and Ruamdahl in Norway, considering Rogenwald as the 1st generation, and so marked.    He was surnamed "the Rich" and was a great favorite of King Harold, called "Fairhair," ruler of Scandinavia.  (is that exactly correct? Was all of Scandinavia united this early, or did he just have the biggest territory, live the longest, and more active to be noticed by semi-historians? Remember Finland is not Scandinavian.  Do you know the Finns came from way over east of the bend in the Volga and their language is Finno-Ugrian.  This makes them related to the Huns, Hungarians, Turks, and Estonians.  And many of us have quite dark hair.  I am 1/2 Finn.  The blond Finns probably reflect a Swedish ancestry.   So they had no linguistic connection to Danish, Swedish nor Norwegian.  Finland has never had a king except later when Sweden or Russia was in charge)"His (Rogenvald) wife was a near relative of the king.  In 888 he received a grant of the Orkney Islands, and his son, Eynär became a permanent prince there, and which his descendants ruled for five centuries." (this letter "ä" seems to be a Swedish letter and not Norweigen.  Did Morrison get mixed up or did he want to use the æ but couldn't?  Or perhaps Eynär is a Swedish name.  Any linguists out there?  I know that at a very early time, it was hard to distinuish between people from these three countries because many times they had the same ruler.     Back to the Folk costumes.  They are gorgeous but I was sad to find out that what I saw in these books and what we see in the media only reflect costumes developed from faded swatches and rememberances of people around 1900.  It reminds me that the tartans worn today that are associated with a particular clan, would have been foreign to Prince Henry and even to John of Exeter who arrived here around 1650.    "The early Tartans were associated with a particular district -World Book Encyclopedia" ---(which could also mean with a particular family maybe, since families had their territory that they were identified with??) but it might also mean that when you moved away from your ancestrial territory to elsewhere in Scotland, that it would be expected that you would then wear the tartan of the new district.    "Later they were used to identify the chief clan or family of an arrea.  Extra lines were added to some designs to show the wearer's rank."  But then maybe people didn't do much moving??    I bet that these questions would have been covered in the Tartan Symposium at the NH Highland games, right?  I'm struggling with this tartan concept.  But I can't read another book--I have 19 of them waiting for me right now!  Just finished "Using Microsoft Windows 98" now isn't that thrilling.Laurel