This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Surnames: LARSON, LARSEN Classification: Query Message Board URL: http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/rw/TNC.2ACI/176.180.472.1.1 Message Board Post: Hi Lillian, I got your message regarding my posting. I have found most of my Larson family back quite a ways into Norway. Over in America (Wisconsin, Minnesota etc) they were listed as LARSON... but all the records in Norway records have them listed as LARSEN. I find that the census takers here did a sloppy job of recording names.. perhaps because of accents, or they just didn't care for the immigrants... who knows? I remember seeing a posting on the Norway List that I was subscribed to for quite some time, so I did a search of their archives and here is a copy of the posting. I think you will see that there were some generalities, but no rule set in stone on the "sen vs. son" naming mystery. Hope this helps you out some. Terry CNIDR <http://www.cnidr.org/> Isearch-cgi 1.20.06 (File: 656) ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 23:08:24 -0500 To: NORWAY-L@rootsweb.com Subject: Re: son vs sen On the Rogaland bydelag I noticed the last names end in son. Elsewhere they end in sen. What's the difference between the two? Of my eight uncles in the US, 3 were born in Norway, one of them from Norway spelled his last name son and the rest of the family was livid about it. Before he died he changed it back to sen and peace was restored in the family. > son are mostly used in Sweden and UK. > sen are mostly used in Norway and Denmark. The spelling -son was also very common in Norway, especially a century or more ago. And that's when a lot of Norwegians came to America. I grew up in an area predominantly settled by Americans of Norwegian descent, and in this area "-sen" is generally associated with the Danish minority. Upon arriving in the states a lot of sen's was changed to son's. So there was often no change in coming to the states. Generally, if you are talking about a century or more ago, there generally wasn't any well-established concept of a "right" spelling in any case. One person might write it down -sen, and another person would write it -son. Of course, it was often clergy writing the names down, and they were often trained in Denmark. Even among the 6 bygdebøker for the island of Karmøy from which some of my ancestors came, the first bygdebok (for Torvastad, written ca. 1980) used the spelling -son throughout, while the later ones all use the -sen spelling throughout (they might vary from their respective conventions for 20th century names, but few of them are mentioned).