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A Lampinen Family Takes Shape

Finally, I have a family for my great-grandmother, Ada Alina Lampinen (1879-1948).

In May I wrote that I had embarked on a search for the names of her siblings. I began combing the Finnish church records for Juuka parish to find them.

The first two names, Henric (1857) and Anna Valborg (1859), came easily because I could use an online index. The next set of Juuka birth and baptism records (1860-1879) has no online index so I needed to browse these records.

After working through the summer, I have now finally finished this somewhat tedious work. It involves deciphering pen-and-ink lettering done in an old-style cursive. I read through the entries for every year looking for the names of Ada’s parents Matti Lampinen and Anna Miettinen as they presented another child to the parish pastor for baptism. I came up with quite a list:

  1. Henric (1857)
  2. Anna Valborg (1859)
  3. Eva Stiina (1861)
  4. Hendrika (1862)
  5. Matts (1864)
  6. Alexander (1866)
  7. Adam (1868)
  8. Alexis (1868)
  9. Mathias Alexander (1870)
  10. Lovisa (1873)
  11. Anders (1876)
  12. Ada Alina (1879)

If you look closely at this large family you will see that we have two children born in 1868, Adam and Alexis. Strangely, these boys were not twins. The record shows one born in April of that year and the other born just four months later in August. This seems very odd. I need to find some more records on these boys to see if I can find an explanation.

In fact, I need to find more records on all of these people. The list raises other interesting questions. Why do we have children with such similar sounding names as Henric and Hendrika? Could she have been named after him because he passed away? Similarly, the name Alexander appears twice. Did the older boy die young?

I plan to move on to the Juuka death records for more information. I need death dates for all these people anyway, and perhaps they can explain some of the curiosities in my list.

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