Genealogy Jottings

Archive for the ‘Finland’ Category

“I am researching Finns this year,” I keep telling myself. And so I must if I hope to maintain focus and steady progress. Jumping from family line to family line creates confusion and slows you down.

But the temptation this week has been strong to take a long-postponed look at my Revolutionary War ancestors. Not only did we celebrate Independence Day yesterday, but I also attended a class last weekend that stole my attention away from the Finns.

Four times a year, on a 5th Saturday of the month, the Denver Public Library hosts a class on some topic of specialized genealogical interest. This month they discussed Virginia research. Well, who has 4 family members who served in the Revolution from the colony of Virginia? I do–Joshua Reed, Robert Kirkham, and John Day (Senior and Junior). I attended the class, learned a bunch, and now I would love to dive into the records to learn more about those patriots.

But I have a research plan. Everything Finnish lies spread across my desk, and I need to finish (ha! ha!) this before I move on to something else. Those Revolutionary ancestors will wait for me, and when their time comes, they will get my full attention.

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!

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.

Over the past couple of months, I have been searching for the identity of an unknown family member. I can recall my mother talking about an aunt in Biwabik, Minnesota, but neither of Mom’s surviving siblings recalls any such person. Was this aunt real, or did I just imagine this conversation?

I do know that the woman was likely not my mother’s aunt, but probably my grandmother’s. To the best of my recollection, they would mention her when they spoke of the Mattilas who had immigrated from Finland at the turn of the last century–my great-grandfather Alexander Mattila, and his sisters, Mrs. Anderson, Mrs. Silberg, and “the aunt in Biwabik”. How could I identify this woman if she did exist?

I began with my grandmother’s address book, which I  have kept since she died in 1977. She used to correspond with a Mrs. Eliot Haberlitz in California. Women never used their first names in those days, but I thought I remembered that Mrs. Haberlitz was named “Dee” and was Grandma’s cousin. Since the Andersons had no children, and the  Silbergs had only a son, could Dee Haberlitz have been a child of the Biwabik aunt?

I consulted the family tree section on Ancestry.com to find anything I could on Eliot Haberlitz. There he was, married to Bertha Parks. Bertha, not Dee? I thought I had the wrong person until I looked at Bertha’s family information. I found that her nickname was “Dee”, her maiden name was Parks, she was born in Minnesota, and her mother was Ida Mattila!

So now I had a possible name for the mystery aunt, Ida Mattila Parks. Sure enough, there she was in Biwabik on the 1910 census. Bertha had not been born yet but there were other children in the household named Elsa, Martha, and George. Now I remembered Grandma talking about these cousins, too. This was likely the correct family.

So, what happened to Ida, and why wasn’t she named in Alexander Mattila’s 1945 obituary? I looked for her on the 1920 census but could not find her.  Ten-year-old  Bertha Parks resided in Biwabik with her sister, Elsa (Mrs. Edward Glass). Where was Ida, and why wasn’t her young daughter living with her? Could Ida have died before 1920?

I went to look at the Minnesota death index on Family Search. There I found that Ida Parks, daughter of Antti Mattila, passed away in Biwabik in 1917.

I hypothesize that this Ida Parks was the missing aunt from Biwabik, and a sister to my great-grandfather Alexander Mattila. Mom’s brother and sister did not remember her because she died long before they were born. So how can I confirm this relationship?

My next step is to search for Ida’s obituary. I have contacted the library system that serves the Biwabik area, and they are searching the newspaper archives for me. I will be thrilled if they locate something. I want to verify that this Ida Parks was the “aunt in Biwabik” whom I heard about as a child.