Regarding the surname “Trygstad”

By Professor Ray Trygstad

Background
A surname of Norwegian origin, taken from any one of several Trygstad farms found throughout Norway. As of the 2010 U.S. census, there were 342 people in the United States with the surname Trygstad. As of 2024, according to Statistics Norway, the are 67 people in Norway with the surname Trygstad. There are at least two people with the surname Trygstad living in the United Kingdom (interestingly, both are symphony musicians), and possibly two or more Trygstads living in the Sønderborg Municipality in Denmark. As a reasonable estimate, there are probably fewer than 450 people with this surname worldwide.

History
Before the 19th century, most Norwegians did not have family surnames. Their second name was a patronymic, their father's name followed by son or dottir. So if your father was named Andreas, your surname would be Andreasson or Andreasdottir. (This is still true in Iceland.) When people began use of a family surname in the 1800s, particularly when they emigrated to the United States, they often took the name of the family farm.

There were multiple farms in Norway named Trygstad. This means that having a last name of Trygstad does NOT necessarily mean you are related to anyone else named Trygstad, as the name represents possibly as many as a dozen distinct and geographically seperated families.

Name Origin
Trygg means safe or secure, and stad is Norwegian for the English word stead, as in farmstead or homestead, a collection of buildings often belonging to the same family and not large enough to be a town. When Trygg is combined with other words, the final g is frequently dropped. According to the Oxford Dictionary of American Family Names (2 ed.) (Ed. Patrick Hanks, Simon Lenarčič, Peter McClure; Oxford University Press, 2022), Trygstad is a “Norwegian habitational name from any of several farmsteads in Trøndelag so named from the Old Norse personal name Tryggvi meaning ‘reliable, fearless’ or an unidentified first element + Old Norse stathr  ‘farmstead dwelling’.”

Trygstad is a name taken from several family farms in Norway, and these are all of the Trygstad farms I have been able to locate. Whenever pinpoint locations of the farms are available they are linked here.

(Some pinpoint locations are from Gule Sider Kart https://kart.gulesider.no/ and also from MapCarta https://mapcarta.com/ with a search for “Trygstad” in both. Other Trygstad farm locations are probably from FamilySearch https://www.familysearch.org/, a service provided by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)

Spellings & Pronunciations
It is pronounced trig-stad with the emphasis on the first syllable. An alternate spelling is Trøgstad.
There is a Trigstad Road in Palo, Minnesota, named for the Trygstad farm there founded by John Martin Andreason Trygstad (of the Sticklestad Trygstads) in the early 20th century. No Trygstads lived in Palo any longer; the locals knew it was called the Trygstad farm but did not know how to spell it.

Nationality & Ethnicity
Norway and Norwegian.

Famous People named Trygstad
No one REALLY famous, but here are some notable Trygstads:

The author of this tome is Professor Ray Trygstad of the Stiklestad Trygstads. There are many of us in the United States because my great grandfather, John Martin Andreasson Trygstad, had six sons: Conrad, Hjalmer, Oswald, Murray (Ray), Arnold, and Hogan, who have many descendants, as well as two daughters, Adelaide and Clara (Claire). Any Trygstads who originated from the Trygstad family farm in Palo, Minnesota are my kin. There was at least one Trygstad who emigrated much earlier from the farm in Stiklestad, Johannes Pederson Trygstad, so that family may also be related.