Leif Biberg Kristensen

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Biography

Leif Biberg Kristensen was born in Norway

I was born in 1952 in the smallish town of Porsgrunn, Norway. I'm now a retired civil servant, having worked for many years with Unix and databases in the IT department of the Norwegian Health and Social Security Insurance administration.

Since 1997, I've been a devout genealogist, with making sense of 18th century parish registers ("Kirkebok") and probate protocols ("Skifteprotokoll") as my favourite subject. I'm working with the entire population of the two parishes Solum and Holla in Lower Telemark, Norway during the period c.1660-1840, and some in the neighbouring parishes. I'm almost exclusively using primary sources, and I always include full transcripts of the Baptism / Marriage / Burial entries from the parish registers. For Norway, the parish registers include the entire population before 1845, as membership in the Lutheran state church was mandatory.

Where I find a probate, I will usually write down what it says about relationships in the Biography section. It should be mentioned that a Norwegian "probate" (skifte) is a quite different animal from its American counterpart. It was a public affair, and there was generally no will involved. Here's a very good Introduction to Norwegian probate records.

In the Sources sections of my profiles, you will also find embedded links to images of the original documents at the Norwegian Digital Archive ("Digitalarkivet"), thus being able to verify the data for yourself, and even (hopefully) arrive at better conclusions than mine.

I started entering data in a couple of programs that I'd rather not mention, but soon I became a fan of The Master Genealogist (TMG), which I used until 2005, when finally my old laptop running Windows 2000 crashed. Working professionally with Unix, I've never been very impressed by Windows, and by then I had developed my own replacement database application (Yggdrasil) in PostgreSQL and PHP, running on my big, fat, powerful Gentoo Linux workstation. This is still my research / production database environment.

Since 2002, I've been running my own genealogy site "Solumslekt". That site will soon be discontinued, and I'm now transferring data to WikiTree, as this site appears to be focused on quality rather than quantity. To that end, I wrote a Perl script which will generate a Wiki biography for any person in my database, complete with inline references. That is saving me massive amounts of typing, and I can easily add scores of people whenever I've got the time.

I do hope that my data will survive here on WikiTree, and not be sold off to one of those disgusting sites that let users connect everyone and their grandmother to Adam, Eve, and G. Almighty. It is also my hope that others will join me and collaborate on the Lower Telemark genealogy, always keeping a decent scientific standard in mind. Documentation is everything.

Orphans

Due to the large numbers involved, most profiles created by me where parents, siblings, spouses, and children have been fully researched will be routinely orphaned. You are welcome to adopt them, but please respect the many years of research behind these profiles, and don't change vital data or add any family members unless they are well documented. Also, I'd love to hear about descendants of my profiles. Please drop me a few words if you're able to connect to one of them.

Useful Links

• Norway Project FAQ
• How to enter Norwegian Names in WikiTree
• Sources for Pre-1700 Profiles in Norway
• Useful Norway Genealogy Resources

Sources

• First-hand information. Entered by Leif Biberg Kristensen in person.

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