Genealogy Jottings

Today I received yet another helpful e-mail reminder about upcoming genealogy events in the Denver area. When viewing this message, I am reminded that volunteerism plays a huge role in the genealogy world. People step up to run local societies, transcribe records, and post information about genealogy online.

Over the years, I have done some genealogy volunteer work, mostly through the Colorado Genealogical Society:

• I served on the Extractions Committee of that group to create a Bride’s index to Colorado marriages and a transcription of records of the Rogers Mortuary in Denver,
• I held the offices of Recording Secretary and Vice-President of the Society,
• I worked with a group from the National Genealogical Society to index the 1940 U.S. census, focusing on Minnesota records (I figured I could read all those Norwegian names).

In recent years I have stepped back from Society work. Attending Board meetings has become prohibitive because it requires a 45-minute drive through rush hour traffic and then paying to park. Instead, I now contribute money to the Society for acquiring materials for the Denver Public Library and the Denver branch of the National Archives.

I could do more transcribing for Family Search. When my life with grandchildren settles down a bit, I probably will devote some time each week to transcribing a few records. After all, I know that the genealogy world runs because of volunteers.

How are you helping?

Sometimes I wonder why I even try to do genealogical research in foreign records when I do not have the proper tools. Well, the answer is that I cannot find the proper tools. I want to find my ancestors, though, so I continue anyway.

This year I ran into the same problem with Finnish research that I had last year with Norwegian research. Both countries have fabulous church records available online, but of course they are all kept by parish. So how do you find the parish boundaries? And how do you know the name of the political jurisdiction associated with the parish at any given time?

None of the maps I have located show both parish outlines and political boundaries. It seems you can have just one or the other. I know these lines changed over time. How am I supposed to even fill in a Family Group Sheet when I cannot figure out the municipality or sub-region associated with a particular church? I find it maddening.

I have searched the local libraries and the internet in vain for any help. So I slog on, but I know my location entries are riddled with errors. This week I needed the correct political jurisdiction for Finland’s Juuka parish for 1860-1879. Karelia? If so, was it East, North, or South? So far I have been unable to discern this information. I sure envy those German researchers with their wonderful gazetteers that tell all.

This past week I traveled to Virginia on a sad journey to attend the memorial service for my nephew Tyler William Reed (1988-2014). He died at too young an age, just twenty-five. He had no children.

With him, the line of male Reeds descending from my grandfather, Owen Herbert Reed (1896-1935), has “daughtered out”. I have two Reed brothers, but one has never married and the other is left with two adult daughters. We have no Reed first cousins.

Nevertheless, we can find other more distantly-related male Reeds out there. The line continues through a couple of my grandfather’s brothers. Our Reed name will live on despite the terrible tragedy of Tyler’s death.

We have survived such losses before. Previous generations in Coles County, IL also felt the sting of the unexpected death of a promising young man. Like me, the aunts of these Reeds mourned their untimely passing:

• Albert M. Reed (1866-1890) the youngest son of my great-great grandfather Caleb Reed, died at age 23 after an illness,
• Daniel T. Reed (1836-1859) and William Fred Reed (1844-1875), Caleb Reed’s nephews, died at ages 23 and 28, respectively, and
• William Reed (1822-1845), Caleb Reed’s younger brother, died of unknown causes at age twenty-three.

Those left behind sadly wonder why we had to lose all these men before they had the chance to live their adult lives. It seems so unfair. We search for answers. Perhaps my sorrowful brother, speaking this week at his only son’s memorial service, offered some explanation when he said, “Father Knows Best”.

Our world upended last weekend. My 25-year-old nephew Tyler William Reed drowned. I feel like the fabric of our family has ripped apart with my heart torn out.

Tyler went missing after a night out with friends at the Washington Nationals game on May 5. He left a restaurant to take the Metro home to Alexandria, Virginia. No one ever saw him again.

Our family searched frantically for him for the rest of the week. Then on Saturday we received the terrible news. The police had recovered his body from the Anacostia River, near the Nationals’ field and the Navy Yard metro stop. He had suffered no trauma and still had his wallet and cell phone.

Tyler, what happened to you?

We probably will never know for sure how my nephew landed in that river. He was a happy guy with many friends. He worked two jobs that he liked, and he had recently re-enrolled in college to complete his degree in sociology. He had a passion for music, playing both piano and guitar, and he wrote many songs.

I ache for my brother whose only son’s life ended too soon. Like all fathers and sons, they had their little frictions, but they shared so much. They even had the same birthdate. How will my brother celebrate his birthday now when his son can no longer join in the celebration?

I hardly know how to say good-bye to this young man who was on the brink of adulthood. We should be congratulating him on his college graduation, not attending his memorial service. Tyler, I am so sad to see you go.

Mother’s Day arrives this weekend, and many of us will visit our moms. We buy cards for them and take them out to brunch or dinner. In our family we also use this as an opportunity to do genealogy.

On Mother’s Day we will honor my mother-in-law, known universally as “Grandma”. She is 83 years old and has a lot of family history stored in her house and in her head.

Grandma came from Minnesota where she was raised in a German Catholic family of 11 children. Her father was one of sixteen. Consequently this presents a large family for us to research.

On Mother’s Day we will encourage her to reminisce once again about her family. Invariably she will dig family treasures out of the basement. She has kept baptism records, funeral cards, and other memorabilia. I am eager to see what else she has.

All of us will have a great time with Grandma this Sunday.

“We knew nothing of our mother’s family. They all stayed in Finland.” This was the only information my grandmother could offer when I asked her about my great-grandmother Ada Alina Lampinen’s family. How do you build a birth family with so little to go on?

In genealogy we work backwards in time, so I began looking for data on Ada herself. My mother told me she had died in Hibbing, Minnesota on the twelfth of May, 1948. Mom also knew she had been 27 years old when my grandmother was born in Minnesota in 1906, suggesting that Ada was born in 1879. Lastly, Mom also recalled her grandfather saying the family was from Viipuri. Another daughter kindly visited the genealogy library at Iron World in Chisholm, Minnesota and found the family’s 1905 immigration papers.

Thus armed with a time frame and an approximate location, we began our search for the Lampinens in the Finnish records. Here is where my husband/tech advisor came in handy.

He located Finnish newspapers online (http://digi.lib.helsinki.fi/index.html) and found a 1904 marriage announcement for Alex and Ada (Lampinen) Mattila in Viipuri. This confirmed our location, and began our dive into Finnish parish records.

These records can be found online, too, at Finland’s Family History Association (http://www.sukuhistoria.fi/sshy/index_eng.htm). Luckily, the index offers a country-wide search, because we found no birth record for Ada in Viipuri parish. Using the broader search, we finally located an 1879 birth and baptism record for Ada in Juuka parish. We learned that her parents were Matti Lampinen and Anna Miettinen who married in 1856. So what about the rest of her family?

The Juuka parish registers for many of the years in which the Lampinen children would have been born have not been indexed. Now I am searching the Juuka images page by page to find them. In addition to Henric (b. 1857) and Anna Valborg (b.1859), this week I located the birth and baptism record for Eva Stiina (b. 1861). I still have 18 years of records to search before reaching Ada’s own birth record in 1879.

Although this is a slow process, I am eager to learn how many sibilings Ada had. Soon we will no longer be saying that we know nothing of her family.

A cardinal rule in genealogy is to learn all you can about the places your ancestors resided. Normally I have not had trouble doing this, and I readily have found information on many places over the years of my research.

This year, however, I have encountered difficulty as I have tried to trace my Finnish heritage. Their history is so complicated, and so much depends on geography. I have yet to find a Finnish gazeteer or a good map.

I never feel comfortable adding new ancestor names to my database until I am reasonably sure they are actually my ancestors. If a purported husband and wife came from different villages, I want to know how close they were. Or in the words of genealogist Pat Hatcher, were they in “kissing distance”? I need a good tool for identifying place names and locations.

So far, I have struggled along with little snippets of maps from various Finnish websites. The Family Search wiki (https://familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/Main_Page) has helped with place names in church parishes. Still, I wish I had the right tools to find my place.

We have had busy times in recent weeks, but not with our genealogy. Or maybe I could call it genealogy, in a way. After all, genealogy includes the study of descendants as well as ancestors.

Our six grandchildren have needed more attention lately. Seems like I have had at least one kid around nearly every day. Enjoying activities with them precludes any serious research. I feel so very far behind on it.

Yet I choose to spend this time with them now, while I have these opportunities. So I have kept a two-year-old while his mom volunteers at the elementary school and takes his siblings to the doctor. I have taken a 10-year-old to a weekly Bible movie during Lent. I have entertained a one-year-old once a week so her mom can get a well-deserved day off. And then there are the soccer games.

Meanwhile, searching for all the grandchildren’s ancestors will need to wait a bit. After all, their Ampuja, Bentsen, Carter, Day, Dunbar, Hall, Howe, Lampinen, Mattila, Miettinen, Myllynen, Reed, Riddle, Sherman, and Templeton forebears are not going anywhere.

My great-grandfather Alexander Mattila’s 1945 death certificate states that his mother was “Lizza Myllyla” of Finland. His American-born daughter was the informant.

As I researched Alex, I found that this information conflicts with his baptism record from Finland’s Viipuri parish. That record says her name was “Elisabeth Myllynen”. The discrepancy needs an explanation.

I do not know much about Finnish ways, but it seems that “Lizza” must have been a nickname for “Elisabeth”. No real problem there, but what about the difference in surnames?

I searched for more evidence by locating the baptism records for Alexander Mattila’s many sisters. Not all the records provided a surname for her. Those that did variously gave her last name as “Myllynen” or “”Myllyin”. While it appears I can discard the “Myllyla” variation as something created by a granddaughter who never met her grandmother, I now had a new problem. Was the surname “Myllynen” or “Myllyin”?

I worked back to locate Elisabeth’s marriage record. There her name was “Myllyin”.

Next I needed to find her birth record for additional documentation. The Finnish Communion Books for Elisabeth Myllynen’s household 1887-1896 provided a birthdate for her, 25 April 1835. A search of Viipuri birth and baptism records for an Elisabeth born that day found only one likely candidate, Elisabeth, daughter of Simon Mattson and Sofia Henr:dr of the Myllynen house in the village of Tervajärvi. This highly-probative record indicates that her name was probably “Myllynen” rather than “Myllyin”, and that is the name I added to my database.

But then I began researching her father, Simon Mattson. All the church records for him gave his surname as “Myllyin”, not “Myllynen”. Again the question arises, what was the family name?

I cannot reconcile this discrepancy. I think I have found distinct people on these records that have gone by two similar surnames. I believe that perhaps the names were used interchangeably in the 19^th century. Finland still had a mostly patronymic system then, and surnames did not have the importance we give to them today. Spelling probably was not yet standardized.

This is the best explanation I can devise. I am not completely satisfied with it. I plan to consult my Finnish friends to see if they can provide any more information on this issue of these surnames. Name discrepancies are red flags that one may be researching the wrong ancestors. I do not want to waste time doing that.

Everyone seems interested in testing their DNA these days. Genealogists in particular flock to companies offering these tests. Why do they want DNA tests, and why have I not joined the throng?

This week our local Computer Interest Group met to hear genealogist Ric Morgan speak about DNA testing. He described the three types of tests available: Y DNA, mitochondrial DNA, and autosomal DNA. Over the past decade, the cost of these tests has come down even as the scientific potential of them has grown. Still, I cannot bring myself to mail in that cheek swab.

Here’s why:

• Y DNA testing is for men only, so I obviously cannot do this one. This test can identify those men among us who are related to one another and who descend from common male ancestors. In my own family, my father’s first cousin Leslie Reed submitted a sample several years ago. This tied us in to the family of Thomas Reed of colonial Morris County, New Jersey. The puzzle now is to sort out all the Reeds in New Jersey at that time and document the families. At this point, we need no further Y DNA testing.
• Mitochondrial DNA traces the direct female line. Mine goes back to Finland. We have had substantial success documenting my Finnish lines without resorting to DNA testing. Because mine is a small family, I have been in touch with most of my American relatives of Finnish descent. I do not know any current family members in Finland, but I also do not think the current DNA databases contain many native Finns who would be possible matches for me. Submitting a mitochondrial DNA test would not tell me more than I already know, especially about my direct lineage.
• Autosomal DNA offers the new frontier in DNA testing according to Ric Morgan. It also poses the greatest privacy threat. Autosomal DNA contains the complete genetic record for an individual. Wouldn’t insurance companies or the government love to get their hands on that! I go to great lengths to protect my privacy, so this test poses no temptation for me. I will keep looking for another way to identify the man who fathered my paternal grandmother in rural Nebraska sometime in 1895.

So there you have it. I plan to keep my DNA untested because the sex-linked tests would be of no immediate value to me. I am unwilling to open the autosomal test door. I will keep doing genealogy the old-fashioned way, one document at a time.