Galtung (noble family)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Galtung family was a Norwegian noble family dating from the ennoblement of Lauritz Galtung in 1648. However, when he was ennobled, documents indicated the family descended from an older noble family, the Galte family. This led to both Hardanger families being referenced as Galtungs in history books.
A male-lineage connection between the two families has not been identified. A female-line bridging them was long proposed until that too was debunked in 1950, by professor Lars Hamre's discovery of the Torsnes' family lineage in Copenhagen archives. The lineage stated that the younger Galtungs were descendants of Sigurd Guttormsson at Torsnes, not Sigurd Gautsson Galte at Hatteberg as previously claimed.[2]
The first family, called Galte, belongs to what was called the uradel (i.e., undocumented as nobility by letters of patent, but widely recognized as nobility in other sources) in the Middle Ages. It is believed that the descendants living today represent the oldest surviving noble family in Norway, commonly known as clan Mel, Melsætten.[3] The old Galte farm estates of Mel and Hatteberg were the core of the later Danish-Norwegian Barony of Rosendal.
