Sannes or Sandnes ?

by marvinsannes

In 1898 my grandfather, Erick, got to Ellis Isl. and Immigration dropped the ‘d’ from his name.  In Norwegian the sound of the ‘d’ is silent.  Erick was quite proud to receive an “American” name.  At 18 he was on his way to N. Dakota to become a homesteading wheat farmer with the love of his life, Bertine Simm, a 19 yr. old  Norwegian beauty, who’d homesteaded 620 acres of bleak North Dakota prairie farmland at Westhope, the yr. before, 1897.

Bertine, emigrated to America because her father, Ole “the Swede Lap”, was part Laplander, and in Norway in the 1800’s having Laplander blood prevented Bertine from working in medicine or teaching or civil service.  Erick was the 1st born and in line to inherit one of the best farms in the Snausa area – he abandoned his princely birthright to follow his love to America.

Quite a story!!

I visited Snausa, Norge in 1995, for a worldwide family reunion.  When I visited the churchyard and my antecedents going back to the 1400’s and saw that the spelling of Sandnes began appearing on stones about 1800, I decided to change my name back to that spelling, some day!

In 2008, my 4th child, Ian, was born in Silverton, his last name is Sandnes – Ian James Sandnes.  I legally changed my name back to Sandnes in 2016 at the Marion County Court House for less than $200 over a period of a few weeks.

The City of Sandnes is the 6th largest in Norge.  In Norwegian, sand means sand, and ‘nes’ or ‘ness’  means ‘point’.  The Sandnes’s were those who lived on the points of sand, many hundreds of farming acres, at the ends of  Fjords.

The Sandnes’s of Snausa have a beautiful farm on lake Snausa, the lake stretches about 100 mi.  NE of Trondheim.  The farm has a beach on the lake with deep golden sand and a beach of several thousands of sq. ft. and the curious nature of this beach:  A few feet offshore the depth plunged to several hundreds of meters.