Genealogy Jottings

Archive for the ‘General’ Category

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!

THE genealogist at the Denver Public Library, James Jeffrey, advises one to die in a small town to get a good obituary. Small town newspapers usually provide detailed write-ups when a resident passes away.

My mystery aunt in Biwabik, MN died in that small town in 1917. I thought that if I could find an obituary for her, I might be able to verify that she was indeed a member of my Mattila family and perhaps learn the names of family members who remained in Finland.

The first thing I learned is that Biwabik is too small to have a public library. Surrounding towns belong to a library consortium, so I contacted them to learn about possible old newspapers from Biwabik. Their librarians have been extremely helpful, but they have been unable to uncover any useful information about Ida Parks. The Biwabik newspaper did not carry an obituary for her. According to the librarian, Finns were looked down on at that place and time, so it was not unusual for them to be excluded from the obituary page.

They did suggest some other sources for me to try, and I will pursue those. But dying in a small town did not get my aunt a good obituary.

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.

I really do not like modern technology, mostly because I do not find it to be intuitive to use. Computer workings just make no sense to me. This week, to my irritation, I had to spend time re-learning things I already knew how to do. I wish they would  quit with the constant “upgrades”, which I prefer to call “worsifications,” and spare me this tedious waste of my time. So what is sending me on this rant this week?

First, my husband/technical adviser changed the software I use for this blog without checking with me first. Although I do like what he did, I wish it had been my decision to make these changes, not his. The timing for doing this was not great with lots of family stuff going on. The new screens look different,  and I have to take extra time to figure out how to use them.

Secondly, I encountered trouble when I tried to do my genealogical duty and volunteer for the effort to index the 1940 U.S. census that will be released shortly. The tutorial for downloading and installing the necessary software made the process look simple. Not! Where I was supposed to see icons and installation wizards, I faced a blank screen.  Had the download gone wrong? Should I try again? After taking time to consult with the same husband/technical adviser, I find that during the past year, my computer had been “worsified” to suppress the icons and wizards I needed. How is that helpful, and why did the folks who wrote the tutorial not know about this new security feature of Windows 7? Or do they expect only people with old equipment and operating systems to help with the census?

It all made for a frustrating week genealogy-wise. I tend to be an independent sort of person, and I resent constantly having to ask for help with computer issues. I am looking forward to focusing back on my genealogy research (pun intended), and using technology as a tool, not an impediment. I just wish we could stop with the constant worsifica–, er upgrades.