Genealogy Jottings

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.