Genealogy Jottings

Recently my husband and I decided to begin planning a trip to visit the homelands of our Norwegian and Finnish ancestors. The Norway part comes easily because we have long known exactly where our forebears lived. My Finnish family origins are a bit murkier. So how do you plan a trip when you do not know exactly where you are going?

My husband had the answer. He would do some of my genealogical research himself and find my ancestral villages–pronto.

Instead of the careful working backward with a research plan that I do, he tends to use the shotgun approach. He locates as many documents as he can in as short a time as he can. Only later does he worry about fitting it all together.

In just a few days he has located Mattila baptism records, marriage banns, marriage records, etc. by poking around in Finnish church and newspaper databases. No matter that he knows not a word of Finnish. He copies whatever he finds and forwards it to me. Now I am drowning in documents that it will take days to sift through.

He learned that my Lampinen family probably came from the city of Viipuri/Vyborg but the Mattilas lived in the rural area south of there. All lies in Russia now. Do we really want to go there?

I think we probably will, but it will be different from the tour of Finland than we had originally envisioned. The logistics of a Russian trip will take time to work out, so now I have a dilemma. Spend my time analyzing all my newly-discovered documents, or work on planning the trip? I feel like I am drinking from a firehose, yet what a satisfying drink it is.

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