Is Onsagen a Norwegian surname?? I searched under Norwegian sites but could not find it being listed?

Question

I searched under all the norwegian sites and could not find it listed....can you help determine where that name Onsagen comes from or could the spelling be wrong??

Answer 1

not Onsagen, but Onsager is.. but it's rare, I live in Norway and
I've never heard such a name.. I did a search on http://www.gulesider.no/tk/ (a norwegian white pages phonebook thingy) and I only found 56 people with this name..
if you're just looking for a random Norwegian surname (to make a character or something like that), then you can't go wrong with Olsen, Hansen, or Johansen. Those are the most common surnames in Norway..

Answer 2

LDS Central, with a gazillion names, has just one Onsagen, a lady born in Wisconsin in 1870.

http://www.familysearch.org/Eng/Search/frameset_search.asp
(Check "Use exact spelling").

RWWC, half a billion names,
http://worldconnect.genealogy.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi
and 0 Onsagens.

Ancestry doesn't have any Onsagens in the US Census from 1790 - 1930.

I'd bet it has been mis-spelled.

Google has 230 hits for OnsageN, several of them yours. It looks like there is at least one person named OnsageN out there, and he/she is a scientist. This is the Google blurb, slightly edited:

Spontaneous Broken Symmetry - Perimeter Institute for Theoretical ...The calculation of Penrose and OnsageN
of the fraction of liquid helium that is condensed is presented. From this emerges the notion of the superfluid ...

That blurb - and the page it references - could be a mis-spelling of the OnsageR who won the Nobel in Chemistry that the people above me mentioned, though.

I just repeated the search with two words -
OnsageR Penrose
and got 18,000+ hits, many having to do with liquid helium. I'm 99% sure the blurb above is a typo, not your long lost cousin with the high forehead.

All in all I'd say the spelling was wrong. "n" and "r" look alike in some typewriter fonts.

Answer 3

Petr Onsagen was a Jesuit priest who was a professor of mine in college. That's where I got the name from. He was very much Norwegian and only came to the US to teach.

They're also correct that Onsager is a Norwegian name. The famous Onsager was Lars Onsager who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

The names may not be in a lot of immigration records because these guys never left Norway as immigrants. Lars Onsager was Norwegian until he died. Petr Onsagen was a Norwegian citizen who came to the US to teach, not to become a US citizen.

Answer 4

Onsager is a Norwegian surname.

Answer 5

Onsager
Norwegian: habitational name from a farmstead named with "Ons"- (from Odin, the name of a god) + "ager"-- ‘cultivated field’.

I would assume by this, then, that someone named Onsager would be a farmer.