Finding the Easy Ones - Swedish Finn Historical Society

Finding some ancestors is easy The SFHS Process and Resources EASY TO FIND: WHY?
•  1) Your ancestor kept his/her birth
name in North America.
•  2) And you have verified her/his
birth date information.
•  3) A bonus: someone saved
EVERY THING about your family’s
history. Clues in the materials?
•  4) Someone somewhere has
already worked out the genealogy.
1)  The key is the person’s birth day, month and year. 2)  AND the birth parish. 3)  The surname can be helpful IF it’s unusual. But let’s take a common surname: SFHS received a query for Ida Erickson, born in Finland in 1894 and died in Duluth, according to the QUERY. Begin by looking into West Duluth, which grew into a Swedish-­‐Finn community with its own Temperance Lodge. All names from that lodge record have been entered into DEE from either Svensk Finlands Nykterhets Förening or Order of Runeberg’s Memorabilia. DEE hWp://finlander.genealogia.fi/databases/deesZs/ Some, BUT NOT ALL, Swedish Finns joined an organiza;on for social, philosophical, or religious reasons, seeking others who spoke Swedish, shared food prefernces, celebrated tradi;onal holidays, sang the old songs. They needed something of the Old Country in their new homeland. SFHS genealogy volunteers use the Lodge publica;ons in our archives to find NAMES IN FINLAND, and BIRTH PARISHES. The page on the previous slide was printed in the Swedish Finnish Temperance Society of America’s Memorabilia publica;on of 1907. Ida belonged to Lodge # 37, named “Beam of Light”. Documen;ng Every Emigrant project has this informa;on in its database. DEE hWp://finlander.genealogia.fi/databases/deesZs/ Send an email to sZs@qwestoffice.net if you have informa]on about lodge members. We will send you a scan of the lodge picture so you can place the name or names on the iden]fied person/s. Documen;ng Every Emigrant [ DEE ] presently includes both Order of Runeberg and Temperance lodges’ members’ names and more. D E E includes that data, from the original membership record. So we use the search form and find The SFHS DEE-­‐collec;ons -­‐ Documen;ng Emigrants SURNAME MAIDEN NAME GIVEN NAME Erickson
Mrs. Albert Pelander
BIRTH PARISH OTHER INFORMATION Ida Mary
Nederve]l West Duluth, Minnesota, Lodge No.37, Lujsstrålen Membership Informa]on (1902 -­‐ 1917) SFNF Open the register and we find her birth date, according to her insurance policy with the Svenskfinlands Nykterhetsförening. It agrees with the query that she was born in 1894. Pelander is more unusual than Erickson. It may show up in another SFHS database: TALKO We now can use Ida’s birth parish to con;nue the search for her family in Finland. So now we have her birth parish NEDERVETIL AND her birth NAME! PELANDER Score! . Let’s go to TALKO to see if someone has shared their family data with SFHS. hap://finlander.genealogia.fi/talko/ TALKO has 2,070,050 individual names and data contributed in GED coms. That means160 different trees/collec;ons have been shared. Hasse Nygård, SFHS webmaster, began family research when he was young, and has connec;ons across Finland. He invited his colleagues to send him their data via GED coms, which he compiled into this Database I ohen begin a query here, if we believe the American last name is the same as the birth name in Finland. ERICKSON was not enough to go on. IDA PELANDER should be enough, plus the birth year, and the birth parish. IF IF IF someone has submiaed genealogical data on Ida to TALKO. Note that there were two Ida Johanna Pelander daughters. One only lived for 2 years. So when the next daughter was born, she was bap]zed with the Ida Johanna names. We see this ohen. THAT’S WHY AN ACCURATE BIRTH DATE IS SO IMPORTANT. The database page shows Ida’s father, her mother, her child, and her husband. Note that his name helps substan;ate that we have found the correct person. Note that several siblings also died in the USA, in par;cular Duluth. The Nederve;l family informa;on is not available on other Internet sources, such as Finland’s Family History Associa;on. FFHA data is entered by volunteers in Finland, of which a much greater percentage are Finnish-­‐speaking. So only a few Swedish-­‐speaking parishes are included. If your family is NOT in TALKO, then Finlander Forum can connect you to nearly three thousand family researchers who are Swedish Finn, and impressively generous with their knowledge. They may have your family informa;on already in their computer. There’s are op;ons on the menu bar of Ida’s page which can open up Ida’s Ancestors or her Descendants in a family, or a list. Data is printable as well. Note the yellow arrow poin;ng back in ;me on far right boxes. This means there are yet more ancestors listed further back in ;me. Twelve genera;ons are listed on TALKO, researched by June Pelo and others. 1550 is the earliest birth date noted for Ida’s ancestors. The King of Sweden had established church record keeping by every parish priest at that ;me. Every person in every parish and city was recorded, and their movements tracked. The king needed detailed informa;on on landowners so he could tax them. No one legally leh a parish residence before receiving a “betyg” from the priest which func;oned like a passport. Open the Migra]on Ins]tute’s data base. It includes passenger lists and passport records. The full database is accessed by paid subscrip]on. The Ins;tute, located in Åbo/Turku, has archived a substan;al collec;on of Finnish emigrant records across the world. There are nearly 600,000 passenger and passport names. The database is very helpful. Of course not everyone registered their departure, for various reasons, but leh from Norway or Sweden or Germany. If an emigrant is not listed here, they may be found on Sweden’s Emibas or German passenger records [Ancestry.com] or in Norway’s Digitalarkivet. The data volunteers con;nue to transcribe passport and passenger informa;on. The earliest records are now as far back as about 1889. Ins;tute of Migra;on has Ida! It even shows how much she paid for her ;cket in FinnMarks. She traveled to England on the SS Titania. I searched the free site, EllisIsland.org. No luck finding Ida Pelander. It’s quite possible transcribers misspelled her name. Her older brothers, Ernst, Axel and Hugo had already emigrated to Duluth, according to June Pelo’s family tree on TALKO. I looked for Hugo on Ellis Island’s database. He travelled to Duluth with a cousin, Onni, and his sponsor was his older brother Axel. A good example of chain migra;on. Searching the names of siblings can help us zero in on informa;on about the name you are seeking. I call it “going through the side gate”. I also searched for the ship “Empress of Britain”. But Ellis Island’s lists only go back as early as 1918, and Ida travelled in 1914. Well, we’ve traced Ida Johanna Pelander to her home parish, and found her family records. This slide shows us when she applied for a passport, so we know about when she departed. Remember she needed permission to leave her home parish, whether to go to another parish for a job, or to travel outside Finland’s borders. This was true all over the Nordic countries. Ida is permiaed to leave Finland for 5 years. And we know that she sealed in Minnesota, USA. Married, had children, joined a Lodge, I’ll bet a church as well. If only we had records from the Swedish Finn Lutheran church in Duluth!