Towns or Farm Names?

[Eva Johnson Zimmer]

1890 Swedish Census states Homestead Hellekilstorp (Övre Ullerud, Värmland) for my Gr. Grandfather. Is this the village/town they lived in or their farm name? He is shown as Egare (farm owner).
 
In parish records my father is shown as being born in Hellekilstorp. In 1900 census it shows the family in Olsäter.
 
I have the same question for Mosserud (Östra Ämtervik). Is Mosserud a town?
 
Thanks for any information you can give me.
 
Eva Johnson Zimmer

[Jan Jutefors]

Eva,
 
Hellekilstorp, or with mordern spelling Hällekilstorp, is a farm.
 
Mosserud is a village.

[Eva Johnson Zimmer]

Jan,
Thank you for clarifying that for me.
 
How does a farm get it's name?  My Gr. Grandfather is shown as egare (owner) so why wouldn't the farm name be Nilsson?
 
I am interested to learn about this.
 
Thanks,
Eva Johnson Zimmer

[Anders Andersson]

If there is any connection between a farm name and the name of its current occupant, then the occupant usually takes his name from the farm, not the other way around. And, since Nilsson is a patronymic name (son of Nils), it would never have been used for a farm name anyway. Maybe a few farms have been named after some famous former owner or occupant, but those cases don't really stand out in the statistics.
 
A small farm or cottage may have had several owners during the lifetime of one person, all of which may spawn offspring bearing some last name based on that of the farm. On the other hand, a major estate may have remained within the same family for centuries, perhaps long enough to blur the origins of their respective names.
 
Place-names can easily be identified by their endings. For instance, the ending -rud means cleared field (röjning) and is quite common in southern Sweden.

[Ann Little]

Anders-I am sorry to have to say this, but I feel that you should not have used the word spawn when referring to people having children. It is derogatory; fish spawn, people do not!
In the Reader's Digest Universal Dictionary it says about 'spawn';  A person regarded as the issue of some usually undesirable parent or family: the spawn of the devil; or,  Offspring occurring in numbers; brood. Usually used derogatorily.

[Anders Andersson]

Thank you for clarifying the word usage; I'm sorry if my choice of word was inappropriate in this context. It's not a word I use regularly, and I don't remember when or where I learned it, so I may very well have misunderstood its primary meaning.
 
Since the Usenet/Internet has been my primary teacher of English for the past 20 years, it's also quite possible that I learned the word from a posting where it was intentionally meant to be derogatory, without that point getting across to me (when I look back at postings I made 15 years ago, I do see differences in my use of English compared to now, but I find those differences surprisingly small).
 
Also, I work in the field of computer science (university), where spawning a process is more or less standard terminology for having one process create another one. The connotations are simply technical, and not at all derogatory, as computer processes have no feelings that I need to consider. Maybe it just reflects the language of the people who created the computing industry.
 
I once replied to an e-mail saying tell me about it with a verbose explanation of what was just said, only to be informed that tell me about it is just an ironic expression for something already known...

[Ann Little]

Hi again Anders,
 
Many years ago, shortly after arriving in England, I worked in the office of a shipping company (sea & air) at Heathrow Airport. I still remember how embarassed I felt when I realised that I had sent a telex saying, that the ship would 'birth', instead of 'berth'!  
 
Ann

[Eva Johnson Zimmer]

Greetings Anders and Ann,
Thanks for the information on farm names.
 
In the U.S. it is common to refer to a long established farm as the old Strauss farm if the farm had began with the Strauss family building the house, barn, etc. and it stayed in the Strauss family for many many years until that family had all died and a new family purchased the farm.
 
I enjoyed your discussion about spawning!! I would have never thought of spawning as a derogatory term although technically it originally was used more often referring to the reproduction of fish as you said Ann!!
 
Seems the definition used most often now is to bring forth, or generate as you mentioned Anders.
 
Thanks for your comments.
 
Eva Johnson Zimmer