Genealogy Jottings

Author Archive

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.

I am STILL hunting for all the Mattila family ship passenger lists. But before going down the challenging road of locating and deciphering Finnish records, I decided to follow some standard genealogical advice. I took out and reviewed the Mattila immigration information I already had to see if I had missed something. As a result, I believe I have located another passenger record, that of Karl and Anna Anderson.

Somehow I had it in my head that all the family had come into the United States through Boston. So I have focused my search on Boston arrivals, especially for these two since they have such common names. When I looked again at the records I have for Alex Mattila and his other sisters, I realized that while Alex and Ida had come to Boston, Olga had arrived in New York. Her sister Anna Mattila Anderson had returned to Finland and then accompanied Olga back to the United States.

Why did they choose New York when everyone knew it cost more? Had Anna traveled through there before? I needed to look for the arrival of Anna and her husband Karl in New York instead of Boston.

To date, the search for their record presented some challenges in addition to their common names. Their U.S. census records give varying immigration dates and birth dates. Searching for them has meant sifting through many records of people with the same names with no definite arrival date and no known port of entry to differentiate them.

To my surprise, with the hunch of a New York arrival, I think I finally located their record. Using the Ellis Island site (www.ellisisland.org), I found Karl and Anna Anderson of Finland arriving on 24 July 1893 on the German ship Ems out of Bremen. The 1910 U.S. census record for my Karl and Anna says they arrived in 1893, so this matches. The ages of these people are very close to those of my Karl and Anna. Eureka!

I do not know why I find it surprising that they traveled on a German ship. My bias probably shows here, because I tend to assume that anyone heading for America would take an English-speaking ship if given a choice. Yet ships came from many ports in Europe, not just Liverpool. Bremen lies closer to Finland than Liverpool does, so perhaps they liked the idea of a port where they could board the steamship for the ocean journey more quickly.

Now if only I could find some inspiration in the search for my great-grandmother Ada Mattila’s record. She is proving to be one tough person to find.

After searching the handwritten Boston ship passenger index from June 1905 through early 1906, I still have not come up with a listing for my great-grandmother Ada Alina Mattila. A 20th-century record for an uncommon name should not be this difficult to locate. I wish the family had kept her travel information, but the daughter who remained in the family home never kept anything.

In all, I now understand why people complain about the difficult search for ship passenger records. I have spent a lot of time looking for the Mattila immigrants without complete success. My results:

• Found Alex Mattila,  Olga Mattila, Ida Mattila Mattson and three children
• Not found Ada Mattila, Karl and Anna (nee’ Mattila) Anderson, Oscar Silberg (husband of Olga), Sam Parks (second husband of Ida), Ida Mattila’s eldest daughter (Rose?)

What could I try next to document these immigrations? Naturalization papers contain immigration information, so I could locate those for the men. I cannot check Ada’s naturalization record because she would not have had a record of her own. Women gained or lost citizenship with their husbands in those days.

Perhaps Finland retained an emigration record that shows Ada’s departure from Finland. A couple of years ago, I found such records for my Norwegian ancestors. The problem in locating a Finnish counterpart is that I am not certain of her identifying information beyond her birth date. Where did she reside before she emigrated? Relatives lived in Kotka, but Ada and her husband always spoke of life in Viipuri (the city or the province?). Alex Mattila sailed from a third location, Hango, but I do not know whether he actually lived there. Still, the Finnish records provide the obvious next research objective for Ada.

As I continue my project to document the lives of my Finnish great-grandparents, I keep working back in time. I have been seeking ship passenger lists for all the family members who immigrated in the early 1900’s, and I have located most of them. Only the record for my great-grandmother, Ada Alina Mattila, eludes me. She did not travel with her husband on the Ivernia in April, 1905.

Years ago I searched Finnish passport records and found that she applied for one from Viipuri in June, 1905. Everyone else in the family had sailed to Boston shortly after acquiring a passport, but Ada’s name does not appear on the index for Boston or any other major port. We know she had reached the U.S. by November, 1906 when she bore my grandmother in Minnesota. Why no ship passenger record for her?

I have tried using every possible variation of her name that I can think of with no luck. Now I wonder whether the indexers missed her name. Starting with Boston ship arrivals in the last half of 1905, I am doing an every name search to see if I can locate her. Tedious, but sometimes it works. Her name must be on a list somewhere; I do not think she stowed away!

Why does a person volunteer? Work for no pay must have a reward of some sort, or people would not do it. Usually they enjoy the work, or want the experience it provides, or see some benefit to others. Volunteers usually get treated well, but even volunteer jobs can have their downside.

Lately I have volunteered to index the 1940 U.S. census in the nationwide project orchestrated by the National Archives and the LDS church. I chose to work on Minnesota records because I have roots there. Many people from Nordic countries settled in Minnesota, and I am familiar with their ethnic names. I thought this would be useful in transcribing Minnesota records.

Thus, I have been frustrated by the project review process wherein arbitrators sometimes alter the names I have listed on the batches I do. I know that it is difficult to decipher handwriting, and I could certainly make a mistake on a name. But I get frustrated when an arbitrator changes a dubious letter to alter a common Norwegian name into a name that does not exist. Most recently, they changed Gravdahl to Gravdohl on a page I did. Yes, the second vowel was ambiguously written, but Gravdahl is a real name while Gravdohl is not.

I have had other questionable changes made, too. One arbitrator changed an obvious capital F (written just like all the F‘s in the gender column) to a Q. How will a researcher ever find this name in the final index?

Now, as far as I know, the arbitrator values stand. The software provides a feedback feature for disagreeing with the arbitrator, but it is not interactive. One does not know whether any further changes get made. I am finding it frustrating to see the arbitrators edit errors into the project when there is no real appeal process. I wonder whether anyone thought to match arbitrators with their ethnic areas of expertise.

This 1940 index is a massive undertaking, and the work has been fun. I wish the result could be perfect. But as has been the complaint with every census index ever made, there will be so many mistakes.

Lately I have been thinking about the method I am using to keep my family history in the cloud. Although I work primarily in my desktop The Master Genealogist software, every month I upload my new data to my website using PHP Gedview. I have had this process in place for some time, but I am thinking it is time to upgrade.

Storing genealogy in the cloud is a rapidly evolving field. Recently  D. Joshua Taylor spoke at RootsTech on this topic. He says that the future of genealogical record keeping lies in this direction. He points out that saving genealogical data online offers us several benefits such as permanent storage, universal access, and the opportunity to collaborate and interact with other genealogists.

Recently I attended a conference where someone expressed interest in the process I already use. She suggested that I do a presentation on it to our local genealogy society. I hardly feel qualified to do this because I feel that my current approach is outdated. But once we do the research and upgrade our record storage, perhaps we should share that information with others.

I changed my tagline on this blog today. I chose the new one after I attended a seminar last weekend and heard an interesting twist on a familiar phrase. We all know that the Declaration of Independence asserted our right to the pursuit of Happiness. The seminar speaker took that phrase and changed it to speak of genealogy as the happiness of pursuit. That really says it all for those of us who relentlessly seek information about our ancestors. So I adopted that thought as my new tagline.

And I have had a happy discovery or two this week. I located a ship passage record for relatives from Finland, and it proved quite interesting. This group came over in 1908, and their record was very detailed–physical descriptions, names and addresses of kin in Finland, and information about relatives already in America.

I still have a couple more ship passage records to locate for my Finns. Four  Mattila siblings in all came over, some with spouses and some with children. I now have the passenger lists for Alex and Ida. I will be truly happy when I have found the records for the rest of them.

One keeps working backwards in genealogy. After searching most of the American records that I can find for my Finnish family, I must now step back in time to locate their immigration records, here and in Finland. To begin,  I should look at ship passenger lists for 1905 or so.

Luckily for me, the name of the ship and approximate date of arrival appear on Alexander Mattila’s naturalization record. He arrived in Boston on the Ivernia in April 1905. The passenger list was simple for me to find.

Unfortunately, he traveled alone, and Ada Alina Mattila’s name does not appear on the Ivernia for that crossing. Perhaps he went to America first to earn money to send to his wife for her trip.

Since women at that time derived their citizenship from their husbands, Ada had no naturalization record of her own that I can consult for clues to her immigration date. I will have to locate her ship passage the old-fashioned way, by searching every index I can find. It may take some time to identify her record because Mattila was a common name in Finland. Many, many young Mattilas immigrated to the United States. I need to sort through all those who are listed under A., Ada, Aida, Alina, Alinia, Elina, etc. to find a young woman fitting her age, marital status, and intended destination.

I do have the search narrowed to a time window from June 1905 to November 1906. These represent the dates between when Ada received her Finnish passport and to when her first child was born in Minnesota. Still, those steamships came over every day. I have numerous passenger lists to check.

Genealogists often encounter difficulty working with non-English names. They sound and look strange to American ears and eyes. But worse, many of our ancestors changed their surnames in an effort to blend in better, making it hard to connect the new American family with the one in the old country.

I am finding examples of this as I hunt my Finnish family. One great-aunt married a man named Parks, reportedly a full-blooded Finn. But “Parks” is not a Finnish name. I do not think I will find any record of him with this name in Finland. So what was his birth name, and how did he come to change it to “Parks”?

A friendly librarian in northern Minnesota has surmised that the original family name was “Parviainen”, and he shortened it to “Parks” to sound more American. Perhaps he did, and I will keep this possibility in mind as I search for more information about this family.

Or perhaps he followed the practice of translating the family name into English as some immigrants did. I know of a Brooks family whose original Finnish name, Joki, meant “river”, so they chose to be called “Brooks” when they came to America. “Brooks” sounds about as Finnish as “Parks” yet one can see the logic in this name change.

I do not know the Finnish word for “Parks”, but maybe a Finnish friend of mine can help me on that. An Americanized name does not have to be a brick wall.

This month’s release of the 1940 U.S. census has genealogists excited to look at this new source of information. Unfortunately, it comes without an index. What was the population of the U.S. in 1940? Over 132 million? That means a lot of names to look through to find a family.

I am helping the effort to create an index by volunteering with the LDS church/National Archives project to build one. I download a census page, read it and enter the data into a template, and then submit my work. Each page takes 30-60 minutes, depending on how hard it is to read the census taker’s handwriting. The census is all in longhand, written with fountain pens. I have chosen to work on pages from Minnesota because my current research focuses on my Minnesota roots. Some of my husband’s family lived in Minnesota, too.

Like many others, though, I have not wanted to wait for an index to look at these records. A couple of tools can help find a family in the absence of an index. If one knows that a family did not move between 1930 and 1940, a converter tool can use the 1930 Enumeration District to suggest possible Districts to search on the 1940 census. Or if one knows the 1940 street address of a family in an urban area, one can use Google maps to identify the major cross streets. Another tool will then provide the Enumeration District for that area. Once you have an Enumeration District, you must do an every name search, but at most it will be a few hundred names.

For my Dad’s family, I knew the ED converter would not work, because they moved from Wyoming to Loveland, Colorado between the census years. Loveland is one of the towns included in the cross street tool so I used it to find Dad’s family pretty easily. Surprisingly, this record contains a huge mistake. It says their residence in 1935 was Wheatland, Nebraska rather than Wheatland, Wyoming. Probably the Colorado census taker was unfamiliar with surrounding states and assumed that since some family members had been born in Nebraska, Wheatland  is located there.

I had less success with my mother’s family. I know their 1940 address in Hibbing, Minnesota so I tried the cross street tool first. No luck. Hibbing is not on the list of towns available with this tool. Next I tried the Enumeration District converter, because I know the family lived in the same house in 1930. Instead of giving me one ED to search, the tool returned seven EDs. I am not willing to slog through that many names to look for them when I do not think any new information will be revealed to me. I already have the City Directory for Hibbing for those years to use as a census substitute, so I will wait for a Minnesota index.

Hey, I am working on it!