Genealogy Jottings

Some time ago, I wrote about my search for the roots of my grandmother’s cousin, Rosie Porras. She came from Finland, and I theorized that she was the daughter of Ida Mattila of Biwabik, MN. Today I came across some new information that makes me think otherwise.

As I went through Finnish baptism records for Ida’s children, I never found a child with a name anything like “Rose”. Then I turned to searching for a marriage and children for another Mattila sister, Sofia. There I found a record for the birth of a daughter, Rosa Wilhelmina, in 1896, prior to Sofia’s marriage to Kalle Ripatti. Could she be the Rosie who came to America separately from Ida in 1913? In Finland, was she always known as Rosa Mattila or was she Rosa Ripatti?

I have a new clue to search in the emgration/immigration records! Rosie, I am on the way to getting you figured out.

As I chase down my Finns, I have pinpointed them to the city of Viipuri/Viborg/Vyborg and the surrounding area. Many of the people in this area claim a Karelian heritage, a sub-group of Finnish ethnicity. They purport to be the “purest” Finns, not contaminated from interaction with Swedes. Today’s Karelians live in the vicinity of Europe’s largest lake, Lake Ladoga. The people are distributed across eastern Finland,  Russia’s Leningrad Oblast, and the Republic of Karelia (which is part of Russia). Viipuri and its environs lie in the Leningrad Oblast.

But not everyone there is Karelian. Was my family? I never heard that word as I grew up, so I do not know.

How will I find out? I have been reading every book and article on Karelia that I can find, but there are not many. Very few have been translated into English. With the limited resources I can find, I am learning about such obscure topics as Karelian mushroom hunting and 19th-century childbirth rituals. This is not much to go on, but I do know that my Finnish great-grandmother was an avid mushroom hunter. Yet it would be a stretch to conclude a Karelian heritage from this single fact.

I will keep educating myself about Karelia and Karelians. With enough background information, perhaps I will be able to make a case either for or against Karelian roots.

A church on the Karelian coast

“I am researching Finns this year,” I keep telling myself. And so I must if I hope to maintain focus and steady progress. Jumping from family line to family line creates confusion and slows you down.

But the temptation this week has been strong to take a long-postponed look at my Revolutionary War ancestors. Not only did we celebrate Independence Day yesterday, but I also attended a class last weekend that stole my attention away from the Finns.

Four times a year, on a 5th Saturday of the month, the Denver Public Library hosts a class on some topic of specialized genealogical interest. This month they discussed Virginia research. Well, who has 4 family members who served in the Revolution from the colony of Virginia? I do–Joshua Reed, Robert Kirkham, and John Day (Senior and Junior). I attended the class, learned a bunch, and now I would love to dive into the records to learn more about those patriots.

But I have a research plan. Everything Finnish lies spread across my desk, and I need to finish (ha! ha!) this before I move on to something else. Those Revolutionary ancestors will wait for me, and when their time comes, they will get my full attention.

One of the reasons I maintain a family website is to provide a way for distant relatives to find me. I have learned so much family history from second, third, and even fourth cousins I never knew until we found each other on message boards or via the website.

It happened again this week, but with a twist. The person who contacted me was not a relative, but rather someone wanting to write about a relative. She is with the Broomfield, CO genealogical society, and they are doing a project on the men who served as station agents for the railroad depot there.

My great-uncle, Robert Morton Reed, was one of those men. Everyone in the family looked up to him, so I am thrilled he is being recognized for his work. Next time I want a nearby genealogy field trip, you can bet I will be going to the Broomfield Depot Museum!

Recently my husband and I decided to begin planning a trip to visit the homelands of our Norwegian and Finnish ancestors. The Norway part comes easily because we have long known exactly where our forebears lived. My Finnish family origins are a bit murkier. So how do you plan a trip when you do not know exactly where you are going?

My husband had the answer. He would do some of my genealogical research himself and find my ancestral villages–pronto.

Instead of the careful working backward with a research plan that I do, he tends to use the shotgun approach. He locates as many documents as he can in as short a time as he can. Only later does he worry about fitting it all together.

In just a few days he has located Mattila baptism records, marriage banns, marriage records, etc. by poking around in Finnish church and newspaper databases. No matter that he knows not a word of Finnish. He copies whatever he finds and forwards it to me. Now I am drowning in documents that it will take days to sift through.

He learned that my Lampinen family probably came from the city of Viipuri/Vyborg but the Mattilas lived in the rural area south of there. All lies in Russia now. Do we really want to go there?

I think we probably will, but it will be different from the tour of Finland than we had originally envisioned. The logistics of a Russian trip will take time to work out, so now I have a dilemma. Spend my time analyzing all my newly-discovered documents, or work on planning the trip? I feel like I am drinking from a firehose, yet what a satisfying drink it is.

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.

After searching the handwritten Boston ship passenger index from June 1905 through early 1906, I still have not come up with a listing for my great-grandmother Ada Alina Mattila. A 20th-century record for an uncommon name should not be this difficult to locate. I wish the family had kept her travel information, but the daughter who remained in the family home never kept anything.

In all, I now understand why people complain about the difficult search for ship passenger records. I have spent a lot of time looking for the Mattila immigrants without complete success. My results:

• Found Alex Mattila,  Olga Mattila, Ida Mattila Mattson and three children
• Not found Ada Mattila, Karl and Anna (nee’ Mattila) Anderson, Oscar Silberg (husband of Olga), Sam Parks (second husband of Ida), Ida Mattila’s eldest daughter (Rose?)

What could I try next to document these immigrations? Naturalization papers contain immigration information, so I could locate those for the men. I cannot check Ada’s naturalization record because she would not have had a record of her own. Women gained or lost citizenship with their husbands in those days.

Perhaps Finland retained an emigration record that shows Ada’s departure from Finland. A couple of years ago, I found such records for my Norwegian ancestors. The problem in locating a Finnish counterpart is that I am not certain of her identifying information beyond her birth date. Where did she reside before she emigrated? Relatives lived in Kotka, but Ada and her husband always spoke of life in Viipuri (the city or the province?). Alex Mattila sailed from a third location, Hango, but I do not know whether he actually lived there. Still, the Finnish records provide the obvious next research objective for Ada.

As I continue my project to document the lives of my Finnish great-grandparents, I keep working back in time. I have been seeking ship passenger lists for all the family members who immigrated in the early 1900’s, and I have located most of them. Only the record for my great-grandmother, Ada Alina Mattila, eludes me. She did not travel with her husband on the Ivernia in April, 1905.

Years ago I searched Finnish passport records and found that she applied for one from Viipuri in June, 1905. Everyone else in the family had sailed to Boston shortly after acquiring a passport, but Ada’s name does not appear on the index for Boston or any other major port. We know she had reached the U.S. by November, 1906 when she bore my grandmother in Minnesota. Why no ship passenger record for her?

I have tried using every possible variation of her name that I can think of with no luck. Now I wonder whether the indexers missed her name. Starting with Boston ship arrivals in the last half of 1905, I am doing an every name search to see if I can locate her. Tedious, but sometimes it works. Her name must be on a list somewhere; I do not think she stowed away!

Why does a person volunteer? Work for no pay must have a reward of some sort, or people would not do it. Usually they enjoy the work, or want the experience it provides, or see some benefit to others. Volunteers usually get treated well, but even volunteer jobs can have their downside.

Lately I have volunteered to index the 1940 U.S. census in the nationwide project orchestrated by the National Archives and the LDS church. I chose to work on Minnesota records because I have roots there. Many people from Nordic countries settled in Minnesota, and I am familiar with their ethnic names. I thought this would be useful in transcribing Minnesota records.

Thus, I have been frustrated by the project review process wherein arbitrators sometimes alter the names I have listed on the batches I do. I know that it is difficult to decipher handwriting, and I could certainly make a mistake on a name. But I get frustrated when an arbitrator changes a dubious letter to alter a common Norwegian name into a name that does not exist. Most recently, they changed Gravdahl to Gravdohl on a page I did. Yes, the second vowel was ambiguously written, but Gravdahl is a real name while Gravdohl is not.

I have had other questionable changes made, too. One arbitrator changed an obvious capital F (written just like all the F‘s in the gender column) to a Q. How will a researcher ever find this name in the final index?

Now, as far as I know, the arbitrator values stand. The software provides a feedback feature for disagreeing with the arbitrator, but it is not interactive. One does not know whether any further changes get made. I am finding it frustrating to see the arbitrators edit errors into the project when there is no real appeal process. I wonder whether anyone thought to match arbitrators with their ethnic areas of expertise.

This 1940 index is a massive undertaking, and the work has been fun. I wish the result could be perfect. But as has been the complaint with every census index ever made, there will be so many mistakes.

Lately I have been thinking about the method I am using to keep my family history in the cloud. Although I work primarily in my desktop The Master Genealogist software, every month I upload my new data to my website using PHP Gedview. I have had this process in place for some time, but I am thinking it is time to upgrade.

Storing genealogy in the cloud is a rapidly evolving field. Recently  D. Joshua Taylor spoke at RootsTech on this topic. He says that the future of genealogical record keeping lies in this direction. He points out that saving genealogical data online offers us several benefits such as permanent storage, universal access, and the opportunity to collaborate and interact with other genealogists.

Recently I attended a conference where someone expressed interest in the process I already use. She suggested that I do a presentation on it to our local genealogy society. I hardly feel qualified to do this because I feel that my current approach is outdated. But once we do the research and upgrade our record storage, perhaps we should share that information with others.