![\"\"\/](\"http:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/07\/072519_1618_TheFinnsRou1.png\")
A recent visit to Finland and a meeting with my third cousins there made me keen to fill out more of my Finnish family tree. I had worked hard on it twice before, but neither time did I exhaust all the research I could do. I started with my Finnish ancestry when I first set up a genealogy office in the 1980’s. I later returned to this line of research before I took a trip to Finland in 2014. Despite this effort, I knew I could do more.\n<\/p>\n
I had begun my initial search with my immigrant great-grandparents, Alexander Mattila and Ada Alina Lampinen. That time I collected American records like naturalization papers, birth and death certificates for children born in the United States, and census records as they became available. I gathered quite a bit of information not only on my great-grandparents but also on several of his sisters who immigrated around the same time. This gave me a running start at learning more about their families in Finland.\n<\/p>\n
Family Search has digitized many Finnish church records. This source enabled me to compile some short family trees before the Finland trip five years ago. I found the research slow-going due to my unfamiliarity with both the Finnish language and the script used in the 1800’s. My husband\/tech advisor helped me with this task. He powered through my family tree back through the 18th<\/sup> century and pulled copies of all the documents he found. I ran out of time to process it all before our trip. Since then, much of it has been in a manila folder awaiting further action.\n<\/p>\n Now I have connected with a Lampinen cousin who has posted much of our shared family tree on WikiTree, a free site for genealogical collaboration. Right away I joined this site so I could work with her. This summer I dug out the 2014 folder and turned my attention again to the Lampinen records. Item by item, I am listing them as sources in my online tree and adding information where I can to my cousin’s Lampinen tree on WikiTree.\n<\/p>\n The public site also offers the option to add DNA test results. My direct maternal line is Finnish, and I have taken an mtDNA test. I am hesitating on whether to share my test on this site. I know that once I put it out in the public arena there will be no clawing it back. I have no strong incentive to share it because I have no mystery Finnish ancestors to identify. The church records have enabled us to extend my family lines without needing DNA clues. I suppose I will wait for someone less fortunate to contact me with a share request.\n<\/p>\n I still have a thick stack of documents to work through this year. I hope to compile it all and create a fan chart of my Finnish ancestors in time for Christmas. Most years I write an ancestor character sketch for distribution to relatives, but the type of research I am doing this summer yields few family stories. A distilled family tree taken from pages and pages of documents will allow everyone to see our roots at a glance. Preserving this information in a non-digital way can help ensure its survival. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A recent visit to Finland and a meeting with my third cousins there made me keen to fill out more of my Finnish family tree. I had worked hard on it twice before, but neither time did I exhaust all the research I could do. I started with my Finnish ancestry when I first set […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-finland","category-genealogy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1736"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1736\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1737,"href":"https:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1736\/revisions\/1737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogyjottings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}