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Christina's two full (i.e., not half or step) brothers were both named Henrik (Henry to us), as the first was named after his father's father and the second was named after the mother's father and it happened that both the mother and the father had fathers named Henrik. Their middle names would both have been Paulsen ("Paul's son"), because they were both Paul's sons. Also, according to tradition, the name of the place where they lived (their "farm" name) would have been added to their name . . . and that name would have changed if they moved to a different place. There is a place called Helland further north in Norway - There may be others. In any case, when the two Henriks came to this country, two years apart in age (one born in 1832 and one in 1834), it must have been very confusing to have the same name. So Henrik, Sr. (the older Henrik) called himself Henry Paulson Helland, Sr., and Henrik, Jr. (the younger Henrik) called himself Henry Paulson Holland, Jr. Note the spelling of the last name was changed in the latter case. They named daughters in the same way in Norway. For example, Bertha Henriksdatter Strand was given the name Bertha. She was a daughter of Henrik/Henry (Henriksdatter), and was probably born in Strand, or lived in Strand at the time she left for America -- There is more than one place called Strand in Norway, by the way ("strand" literally means "beach" in Norwegian); Bertha was from Strand in what is now called Rogaland. "Christina's" first name (also seen spelled in this country as "Christena," including on her gravestone) was probably originally (in Norway) Christiana. Possibly Christina was her mother's mother's name. As you will probably have figured out for yourself (but some people may not have thought of it yet), people who took censuses - or took down names on passengers lists, etc. - couldn't always spell or didn't understand the names they were told by the people who they were interviewing; also, they didn't always interview the people who actually knew the correct spelling (or other correct facts about the person being asked about). It would be especially hard to understand someone who was speaking English as a second language, or hardly speaking it at all. And some people didn't know all the facts about themselves, for instance just where they were born -- They might have known where they were "from," i.e., the place the family came from before ending up where they were now, but not where they were born; believe it or not, it is true. Many of them didn't know where their parents were from, but they thought they did -- and some of the "facts" they remembered about their parents were actually family lore they'd heard about some uncle or aunt or grandfather or someone else. And so on. This is why we see so many different spellings of a person's name on different censuses, and different places of birth, etc. But our ancestors from Norway had more problems with their names than many others, and we have problems finding them or their relatives in records, due to their traditional way of naming people, mentioned above, which even in Norway must have been confusing - though they probably didn't move around much - as they were sometimes listed by their first (given) name, sometimes by their "farm" name (the name of the place where they lived) and sometimes by their "middle" name which was the name after someone else's plus the "sen" or "datter." When they got to America they used all these different ways of putting their "American" names together and so that's why two brothers may have different last names, for instance. Back to Christina Helland Reagan page.
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