Genealogy Jottings

My mom grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota where her Finnish Mattila family surrounded her with grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. She moved away from there when she grew up, but over the years she and my grandmother talked about these relatives a lot. Consequently their names became familiar to me although I never met most of them.

The other day I came across an undated photograph of a family gathering in Hibbing, probably from the 1940’s. I recognized a few of the people but could not identify all of them. Luckily, someone had thought to write names on the back of the picture. They included two children named Lulu and Bubber. Odd names that must have been nicknames. Who were they?

I vaguely recalled hearing these names before, but I could not remember these kids’ real names or how they were related to me. This week I figured it out.

When I visited the Minnesota Historical Society last month, I gathered several death certificates for my Finnish family. One of them was for my great-great aunt, Anna Mattila Anderson (abt. 1866-1947). As I pieced together her life, I looked at her household on the 1940 U.S. census.

This evidence solved my mystery. The record listed two grandchildren for Anna, Louise and Charles. Lulu and Bubber, my mom’s second cousins!