Genealogy Jottings

So who drowned? I posed this question a couple of weeks ago as I pondered finding the truth hidden in family lore. My grandmother had told me that her paternal grandfather Antti Mattila had drowned/died at sea long ago in Finland. Yet when I located his burial record, I found that he died of tuberculosis. If not the grandfather, someone else must have suffered the fate of drowning. The drowning of a relative is a dramatic event that people tend to remember.

I kept searching the burial records for a drowning, looking for all the Mattila sisters, their husbands, and their children. I finally found the likely candidate. Kalle Ville Ripatti, husband of Antti’s daughter, Sofia Mattila, drowned at age 23 in 1899. This must have been the story my grandmother heard.

Sofia and Kalle Ripatti were her aunt and uncle. She never met them because he died before she was born, and Sofia remained in Finland. It would have been easy for Grandma to confuse the identity of the victim when she had never met the numerous relatives who stayed behind in the old country. Of course this story stuck in the minds of those who immigrated to America, and they probably talked about the tragedy.

Even aside from the drowning of her husband, poor Sofia led a very hard life. Her father died of tuberculosis when she was just 12, and her next-older sister Helena passed away from the same disease two years later. Sofia became an unwed mother to her daughter Rosa before marrying Kalle Ripatti in 1896. Then he drowned less than three years later, leaving her with 3-year-old Rosa and two younger children. How did Sofia ever survive all this? In her own way, she must have felt like she was drowning, too.

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