Genealogy Jottings

Do you still send Christmas cards? I do! They go to family members and old friends who live in other cities.

My cards probably would strike the average person as a quaint reminder of days long ago. You see, I have not, and will not, ever write a generic Christmas letter meant to be a one-size-fits-all summary of the year. I hand write a unique letter to every recipient, about 40 of them. Each person has different interests, and I try to address those when I include a one-page letter in each card. Often, I include prints of interesting family photos, too.

This is how my mom and grandmother handled Christmas cards, and I see no reason to change. Shortly after Thanksgiving, they began writing their letters and signing the cards they had purchased on sale after Christmas the prior year. They wrote family news in some cards, or they chatted about topics of mutual interest. They hoped to get them all out by Christmas, doing a couple per day. They displayed the cards they received in turn, and I do that, too.

Not many people send me a hand-written Christmas letter any more. I miss that. I have saved all those I received in the past, and I cherish those thoughts and writing samples. Many of the writers are gone now, but they remain alive in the Christmas cards they sent to me. I hope I will be remembered through my cards and letters as well.

Who can remain uninterested in holiday foods this time of year? This subject lies at the heart of the Christmas season.

In the home where I grew up, Christmas baking began shortly after Thanksgiving. With four children plus grandmothers who always visited for a week or two during the Christmas season, my mom needed to have lots of snacks ready. We baked, and then we baked some more.

Chocolate chip cookies remained everyone’s favorite, and we mixed up quadruple or even quintuple batches. We also baked decorated spritz cookies in several colors. For these we used a hand-powered press containing stiff, refrigerated dough. Each person took a turn manning the press when the previous baker wore out. We displayed the finished product in large clear jars. We also liked to have candy around at Christmas time, too, so we usually made a big pan of fudge and put out colorful ribbon candy.

The biggest baking marathon took place when we prepared the traditional Scandinavian treats. For the fried bread called fattigmand, we prepared the rich dough with a dozen eggs, brandy, cardamom, and 6 cups of flour early in the day. Mom always insisted on fresh cardamom, so we had to shell it all and grind it. After dinner, Mom started rolling and cutting the dough into parallelogram shapes with slits in the middle while we kids folded each piece and shuttled them to Dad. He stood at the stove with the fan running while he deep-fried each piece in hot lard. When the kitchen grew too warm, we opened the front door to let the cold Wyoming wind cool us down. Everyone wanted fattigmand for breakfast or coffee breaks, and they did not last long.

To make our other Scandinavian delicacy, sandbakkelse (sand tarts), we used our thumbs to press sweet dough into tiny fluted tins. Getting the baked tarts out of the tins could be tricky and frustrating. Yet if some tarts broke, we did not mind because we could eat those right away instead of saving them until Christmas.

On Christmas Eve, Mom always made a ham because she found it easy and liked the leftovers. We gobbled it down because we were so eager to get to the gifts under the tree. Before we could begin tearing open the packages, we had to wait until someone made up the Cranberry Twinkle Punch prepared trays of cookies, cheese, salami, and crackers. Sometimes we had kipper snacks, too.

The next day, on Christmas Day, we would enjoy a turkey dinner, very similar to Thanksgiving Dinner of the previous month. We dressed up and dined using our best china and silver at a table decorated with candles and real cloth napkins. As an extra treat, the children were allowed to drink chocolate milk. We were careful to enjoy it all because we knew this meal marked the end of the Christmas cooking and baking season. We would not see food like this again for another year.

Tomorrow is the first day of Advent, and the geneabloggers group has a great idea for the season. We will write posts every day about some our family Christmas traditions. This way, we can gather, organize, and preserve our Christmas memories. We begin with Christmas trees.

As I grew up in the 1950’s and 1960’s, first in North Dakota and then in Wyoming, we always put up a Christmas tree. My siblings and I eagerly anticipated doing so each year.

Sometime before Christmas, we took a trip with our Dad to the local tree lot, selected a fresh 6-or-7-foot tree, and took it home on top of the car. Dad would set it up in the living room, and then we allowed it to “settle” for a day or two.

When my mom deemed the tree to be ready, the entire family took part in decorating it. Dad strung the colored lights while we children held the light strand to keep it from tangling. We then added metal reflectors behind each bulb. Most of the decorations were blown glass ornaments, but I also had a Styrofoam ball ornament decorated with ribbon and glitter that I had made in the first grade. My brother insisted that it be hung at the back of the tree every year because he thought it was so ugly. We finished the tree off by placing a star on the top and hanging icicles from the branches. I do not recall having a skirt around the base of the tree, but that did not matter because the area would quickly fill with brightly-wrapped gifts. When we finished decorating the tree, we turned off all the room lights in order to admire our handiwork. Perfect!

The tree remained up until New Year’s Day. While a televised football game played in the background, we all helped remove the decorations. We stored them all away (even the icicles) in boxes in the basement until the next year. Then we dragged the poor, now-dry tree out to the alley to await pickup by the local trash collectors. Christmas was over for another year.

For Christmas distribution this year, I am finishing up my last biographical sketch of my great-grandparents. I began this project several years ago. Each calendar year I have done exhaustive research on one person or couple, collecting information and photographs. At the end of the year, I have written and illustrated my findings and sent them around to relatives. I am missing only one person, my paternal grandmother Grace Riddle’s unknown father.

I began this project when I realized that the memories of this generation of family members, who lived between 1845 and 1976, would be forgotten unless someone recorded them. I never met any of my great-grandparents personally, but I had heard stories of them as I grew up. Our photo albums held their likenesses. I knew I could be the one to memorialize their lives when no one else has. My project preserves some of the history of our family’s survival through difficult times from the Civil War through the Vietnam War.

With this step complete, next year I hope to go on to begin writing about the previous generation of sixteen great-great grandparents. I will not have the oral history and photographs available to me that I did with my great-grandparents. Consequently, I will need to take a slightly different approach. But there are stories here, too, that I can create from documents left behind by these forebears. Among others, these will be the stories of Jane and Caleb Reed, who moved in covered wagons to the Illinois wilderness, of the blacksmith Thomas Sherman and his yet-to-be-found German wife, of elderly Karen and Nikolai Bentsen who left Norway to follow their children to America.

I do not know how many miles lie ahead on this road, but I am happy to have reached the first milestone on the journey. I will never run out of ancestors to study, so the quest continues until I must hand if off to another. In the meantime, my only question is, who will I write about next?

Because I live near a large city, I frequently have the opportunity to hear nationally-known genealogy speakers. Just this fall, I attended day-long seminars by Dr. Michael Lacopo (sponsored by the Palatines to America), and David MacDonald (sponsored by W.I.S.E., the Wales, Ireland, Scotland, England research group). The genealogy speaker’s market has exploded in recent years, and most of the well-known genealogists make their way to Denver sooner or later.

For those genealogists who live in more remote area, the pickings are not so rich. To view similar presentations, they must attend genealogy conferences. The National Genealogical Society (NGS) and the Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS) host large annual conferences around the country. A consortium of societies and vendors sponsors the technology-focused RootsTech conference in Salt Lake City each year. Some state societies hold large conferences as well.

Potential speakers pitch topics to the event organizers. The subjects selected for the conferences often focus on development of professional skills or research in the conference locale. There may be a group of presentations on a current hot topic, like DNA.

The speakers for the upcoming FGS conference in Fort Wayne, Indiana were announced recently, and I was surprised to learn that Thomas McEntee will not be among their presenters. He is well-known in genealogy circles as the organizer of all the genealogy bloggers out there, including me. At this year’s RootsTech conference, he spoke on Twitter for genealogists and inspired me to try it. He has a lot of good ideas about how to use technology in genealogy.

Those in the Denver area will get to hear Thomas McEntee next year even though he will not speak at FGS. The Computer Interest Group of the Colorado Genealogical Society has invited him for their one-day spring seminar on May 25, 2013. I am eager to learn more from him, so I plan to sign up for this seminar. I am lucky to live in the midst of a large genealogy community that provides these opportunities. I wonder who FGS selected to speak next year when they passed over Thomas McEntee. Would it be worth a trip to Indiana?

Every genealogist has his “brick wall” ancestors. You know the ones. No matter where you look, it seems you cannot find anything about their origins or fit them into a birth family. The family tree ends with them. The reasons for this vary from illegitimate births to immigration from unknown places.

My husband and I have our share of “brick wall” ancestors—Catherina Wohrmann, Katherine Stillenbaugh, John Davis Riddle, and Daniel Sherman, to name a few. We look at evermore obscure records trying to find them and still come up empty. So we sigh, give up on them for awhile, and look again when a new record set becomes available or we find a new clue. We have looked for these people for 20 years and wonder whether we will ever discover their origins.

This week local genealogist Pat Roberts spoke to the Germanic Genealogical Society of Colorado about breaking down brick walls. She, too, has had elusive ancestors, but she never gave up on them. Finally this summer she found some success with one and discovered an entire line of German ancestry in the Mohawk Valley of New York. She described her research process and gave us a checklist to use to develop an exhaustive research plan.

Her presentation serves as an inspiration to all of us. I will definitely make use of the checklist she provided next time I tackle one of these ancestors. Maybe I, too, can break down a brick wall like Pat did.

Last night I went trick-or-treating, not for myself, but rather to accompany a group of small children. We walked down one block, crossed the street, and went up the other side. By then they had enough candy to last them awhile, so we returned home.

As I pushed the youngest trick-or-treater in his stroller, I was struck by how much the Halloween celebration has changed since I was a child. Of course the youngsters with me did not want to hear about Halloween in those olden days, but someday they might. I should write down and preserve those memories.

Holiday celebrations make up a big part of our lives. We owe it to ourselves to remember our traditions and how they evolve. While kids still go trick-or-treating as they did when I was young, I did not see the huge numbers of children staying out for several hours, unaccompanied by adults, that we saw when I was a child. Costumes are more elaborate now, but they lack the face and vision-obscuring masks we wore. Halloween parties have become popular whereas I do not recall ever attending one as a child. The holiday remains the same, yet different.

I keep a folder of recollections of events from my life. Someday I hope to organize them into a memory book for my descendants. We have a couple of ancestors who did that, and now I savor every detail of those long-ago days. It is time for me to dig out that Reminiscences folder and add a page about Halloween.

I find that I make more progress with my genealogical research when I focus on one familyline at a time. Recently I am feeling almost disoriented because I have not been following my own advice. All year, I have tried to find the discipline to study only the Finns, but I keep getting distracted.

Earlier this month, I went to Salt Lake City for a research trip. After one day with Finnish records, I needed a break from that difficult task. I spent the remainder of my time at the LDS library investigating my English and Scots-Irish lines in the American Midwest.

I resumed some Finnish research once I returned home, but a week later I attended the semi-annual Palatines to America seminar in Denver. This took my attention away from the Finns again as I spent an entire day learning about German research from Dr. Michael Lacopo.

What a harried month! The Finns, the English, the Scots-Irish, the Americans, the Germans! No wonder my head spins. I need to get everything I collected this month filed and put away pronto. Perhaps then I can get back to the focused research tool that works for me, the laser, not the shotgun.

My mom’s Finnish cousin from Minnesota visited me yesterday. She brought along some old photo albums that she had found in her mother’s cedar chest. She did not know whether they had belonged to her mother or to her grandmother (my great-grandmother, Ada Alina Lampinen Mattila).

Filled with heavy black pages, the books overflowed with photographs. Sadly, virtually none of them had been labeled. This cousin sought to find out whether I could recognize anyone.

It became pretty much a futile effort. Faces of long-dead Finns stared out at us from the pages, but aside from noticing a strong family resemblance, we could identify only a few people.

Then we came to a photograph of two women and three children taken at a studio in Wiborg, Finland. Underneath, someone had written, “Our Grandmother”. This really caught my attention. Whose grandmother was she? Paternal or maternal side?

Using every analytical tool I know for old photographs, I inspected this photo. I decided that even if the album belonged to Ada Mattila, she did not write the caption. She would have written in Finnish, not English. The writer must have been one of her children, so “Our Grandmother” was either Ada’s mother (Anna Meittinen Lampinen) or Ada’s mother-in-law (Liisa Myllynen Mattila).

The Mattilas lived near Wiborg/Viborg/Viipuri, but the Lampinens came from further north. This must be Liisa Mattila, probably with a daughter and three grandchildren. Which daughter? She had eight of them.

There is no date on the photo, but the clothing looks turn-of-the-twentieth century. I know that Liisa’s daughter, Ida Mattson, was widowed with three small children about that time. Ida and family then emigrated to the U.S. in 1908. Could they have posed for this photo before they left?

That is my best guess. Until I learn otherwise, my new treasure will be identified as a photo of my great-great grandmother Liisa Mattila; her daughter, Ida Mattson; and her grandchildren Elsa, Yrgo (George), and Martha.

This week my husband and I spent three days at the massive genealogy library in Salt Lake City. To prepare for this trip, I had scoured the online catalog for call numbers that might relate to the Finns I am studying this year. The LDS church has not yet digitized all of its Finnish collection, so I can either order microfilm and fiche to be sent to Denver (at $5+ per roll), or I could make this trip to look at as many rolls as physically possible in three days.

Upon arrival I sat down at a microfilm reader on the international floor of the library. Yet even though I thought I had devised a suitable research plan, I felt overwhelmed as I stared at the materials I had brought along. I scarcely knew where to look first.

Finally, I decided to begin with land, court, and guardian records because I cannot get those online at home. The first rolls of film I pulled were all in Finnish or Swedish (of course, but I cannot read either language). To boot, they were not indexed. Dead end for me at this point.

In growing frustration, I looked again at the lists I had brought. Maybe I could try looking at communion books. I had no idea what information they might contain, but at least they seemed to be organized by head of family.

Looking at these call numbers, I realized the communion books are on fiche, not microfilm, and I did not know where to find them in the library. A helpful staff member finally located the appropriate spot, but she told me, “No one ever uses these.” I sat down at the fiche reader anyway. When I asked where I could make copies of anything I found, she replied that she did not think I could.

I sighed and began searching the fiche. Slowly, I deciphered how these unfamiliar records were kept. I found them extremely difficult to read, not only because of the script used. Whenever someone left the family, through marriage or death, for example, the record keeper drew a line through the name. Still, I did locate my Mattilas in the two volumes kept from the 1870’s through the 1890’s. I also found numerous entries for Myllynens, but I do not know which of these might be mine. I copied down all the families onto the legal pad I carried.

While I worked, a group touring the library came by. Their tour guide told them, “Here is the microfiche, but no one ever uses it.” Except me. Still, late in the day, another library patron sat down to look at some of the fiche. As we bemoaned having to make all hand-written notes because we could not make copies of the records, another staff member wandered by. “Oh, but you can!” he informed us. It turns out that their snazzy little microfilm-copying machines have a fiche-printing feature.

By the end of the day, I felt exhausted from this research. I did not have much to show for the hours of work except for a list of people with my Myllynen surname and a slight familiarity with a new record set. Discouraged, I gave up on the Finns for the rest of my visit. Maybe their records will be indexed someday. In the meantime, give me the good old American stuff. At least I understand how our records are kept, and I can read them.

I spent the next two days happily working on the U.S. floors of the library.