Genealogy Jottings

I could not resist taking a sneak peak at census records for my Finnish family. I know I said I would wait until the new year to begin working on this line, but I just got the urge. So I fired up Ancestry.com to take a look at the 1920 census.

Years ago I had not been able to locate my Finns on that year’s census even though I knew they lived in Hibbing, MN at the time. They were not on the Soundex, nor could I find them with a visual inspection of the city lists. There was not much else I could do.

Now, one can perform creative searches in online census records. Neither “Alex Mattila” nor “Alexander Mattila” returned a result showing my family. After fruitlessly trying the names of other family members, I finally decided to look for just first names paired with other distinguishing information. I finally found them when I entered my grandmother’s data (Martha, born in MN in 1906) coupled with a father named Alex. This yielded my family, but the census report had really distorted their names.

The Minnesota census taker must have had an awful time understanding what these immigrants said. Although my great-grandparents had lived in America for 16 years by 1920, they still spoke English with heavy accents. When the head of household gave his name as Alexander Mattila, the census taker wrote the unfamiliar name phonetically as “Alex Sandermatella”. This “Sandermatella” surname attached to everyone else in the household. No wonder I could not find the family when I searched the “M” Soundex listing.

After misreporting the family surname, this census taker was not finished garbling the record. The mother and eldest daughter were listed correctly as Ada and Martha, but the younger children’s names were confused almost beyond recognition. Aida Sylvia became “Autoulia”; Hugo Alexander became “Hokeselander”; and Peter Bernard became “Petebarkardt”.

I wonder whether the records of other immigrants who lived in the Hibbing area have similar problems. It pays to remember that not all census takers made an effort to complete an accurate report.