19. March 2012 by Tony.

We are sorry for the inconvenience, but we’ve had to move this blog to a new location.

Find it at http://norsky.net/TerisBlog/

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15. March 2012 by admin.

Because of some travel and family commitments, I had little time for genealogy during the past week. Now I am home and ready to resume my Finnish research.

The Mattila family arrived in America mostly in the early 1900’s, and I have been working to locate them on the U.S. census. I do not have a complete census survey yet, but I have identified four (out of a reported nine) Mattila siblings who immigrated: Ida, Anna, Olga, and Alexander. This census work has been difficult because of recording errors made by the Minnesota census takers. I have not yet found Olga on the 1910 census nor have I located Ida in 1920 or 1930. The 1940 census will be available very soon so I will need to take a look at it, too.

What is the deal with Ida? Perhaps she died early although I have not found a burial record for her in Minnesota. I cannot recall much conversation about her other than vague references to “the aunt in Biwabik”. She was married a couple of time, so I should be able to locate a marriage record for her in the United States.

In fact, there remains much American research I can do on the this family before I can even begin with Finnish records. Time to get back to work!

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1. March 2012 by admin.

Yesterday was Leap Day.

What interesting events might have occurred in my family on Leap Day in years past? Our online genealogy program, PHP Gedview, has an anniversary calendar feature that I can use to find out.  So I navigated to the site and pulled up the calendar for February 29. The answer is, nothing of importance to my family has ever happened on Leap Day as far as I know.

By February 29 this year, I had 2282 people listed in my family tree. Most of them have several life events documented (births, marriages, deaths, etc.), yet not one event has occurred on a Leap Day. Nobody planned such a memorable wedding date, and we have no Leap Day birthdays. Looking at my family tree, one would never know that February 29 even exists.

I am not a statistician, so I do not know the odds of events landing on a day that occurs only once every four years. I think the chances are probably small, but I really thought I would find something. On every other day of the year I usually find more than one event. Why not Leap Day?

It is now too late for 2012, so how about planning something for the next Leap Year in 2016? If someone would get married on Leap Day, we could finally fill in that space on the family anniversary calendar.

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23. February 2012 by admin.

My Dad’s family has lived in America since Colonial times. Whenever I work on one of his lines, I can find several other researchers pursuing the same family tree. I really enjoy collaborating with them, and the exchange of information moves my research along at a good pace.

I do not find this kind of help when I research my mother’s family. As I work on her Finnish line this year, I have not found another soul researching the Mattila family. No one has replied to my postings on the genealogy message boards. I cannot find family trees on Rootsweb, Ancestry, or personal websites.

It is clear that no one will be providing me with any helpful hints on my project for this year. I must be the lone wolf. So I am working along in the tried-and-true way of collecting census data for Alex Mattila and the sisters I know about. I already have a few vital records and obituaries for some of these people, and I will order more. Once I have collected all the American records that I can find, I will begin the search for Finnish ones.

I remember working alone this way in the days before the internet. I may not have research partners, but I do have internet resources that were not available before. I can do this!

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16. February 2012 by admin.

Every year from about February through May, the genealogy societies offer seminars featuring prominent genealogical speakers. These allow people like me to learn about new sources and research approaches. I could spend a lot of money to attend something like RootsTech in Salt Lake City or this year’s NGS conference in Cincinnati. But I am fortunate to live in a large metropolitan area where local societies bring in national talent. For example, this season we have Dick Eastman coming to the Computer Interest Group seminar and Hank Jones will speak to the Palatines. In lean years, I can avoid travel to a conference and still attend something nearby. Time to get signed up!

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9. February 2012 by admin.

Recently we upgraded our genealogy software to Version 8 of The Master Genealogist. My husband did the installation, and it seemed to go smoothly for him. As I began working with it, I encountered no difficulty, and most of it looked very similar to Version 7. I did have to re-create my customized screen layout, but I could immediately begin working in the software.

I did find one problem though, and I do not know whether to blame myself or the software. It ate one of my sources, the Alex Mattila Estate. This source, which I have cited 13 times, has disappeared from the Master Source List although the associated tags continue to show that they do have a source. Where did the source information go, and how do I get it back? Via an internet search, I cannot find anyone else who has experienced this problem. I cannot find any information on how to recover source information.

Rather than trying to do a repair to the data, instead we opted to re-install Version 8. I will have to redo the small amount of work I had done after the initial installation, but at least the data set is intact. I hope my experience with the data-eating vampire was my own fault and not a bug in this new product.

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2. February 2012 by admin.

Last week I spent time in upstate New York caring for my grandchildren. Not much opportunity for doing genealogy that week, but it offered precious time to know the youngest generation of the family. After all, I pursue my research in order to hand some family history down to them someday.

This year I will reach my goal of documenting for them the lives of my great-grandparents, except for one great-grandfather whose identity may remain unknown. These people are great-great-great grandparents to my grandchildren, just 8 of the 32 ancestors they have in that generation. Their lives spanned a huge time period from the birth of Samuel Harvey Reed in 1845 to the death of Ole Bentsen in 1976.

It is the story of immigrants and of homesteaders, and how they came to live in the American West. It explains so much about who we are today. How I wish I had received this much information on my own third great-grandparents!

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12. January 2012 by admin.

Earlier this week, I learned that The Master Genealogist (TMG) software sub-group will discuss the recently-released TMG version 8 at next month’s Computer Interest Group meeting. One of the facilitators already uses it, and he takes his laptop to the meetings. This will give me an opportunity to view the product before I upgrade to it.

I migrated to TMG a few years ago. I liked the software’s ability to handle more details and to create better citations than the product I used before. But the version I have does not work well with Windows 7. I have had difficulty preparing reports. Now I wish I did not have to wait an entire month to see Version 8 in action.

In the meantime, I am continuing to update my records in Version 7. When I did the original research on my Finnish family, I still used a different software that did not accommodate all the data from many of my sources. Now I am reviewing all those old documents and adding information to my database. Maybe as I do this, I will unearth an important clue for further research on this family.

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5. January 2012 by admin.

Common wisdom tells us to write to relatives early in the process of researching a new line. So far with my Finnish project, I am finding that the relatives do not have much to offer. My aunt and uncle do not know any more than I do about the family history. Their cousins, who are younger than I am, know even less. It seems I will have to do the heavy lifting on this one.

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15. December 2011 by admin.

I could not resist taking a sneak peak at census records for my Finnish family. I know I said I would wait until the new year to begin working on this line, but I just got the urge. So I fired up Ancestry.com to take a look at the 1920 census.

Years ago I had not been able to locate my Finns on that year’s census even though I knew they lived in Hibbing, MN at the time. They were not on the Soundex, nor could I find them with a visual inspection of the city lists. There was not much else I could do.

Now, one can perform creative searches in online census records. Neither “Alex Mattila” nor “Alexander Mattila” returned a result showing my family. After fruitlessly trying the names of other family members, I finally decided to look for just first names paired with other distinguishing information. I finally found them when I entered my grandmother’s data (Martha, born in MN in 1906) coupled with a father named Alex. This yielded my family, but the census report had really distorted their names.

The Minnesota census taker must have had an awful time understanding what these immigrants said. Although my great-grandparents had lived in America for 16 years by 1920, they still spoke English with heavy accents. When the head of household gave his name as Alexander Mattila, the census taker wrote the unfamiliar name phonetically as “Alex Sandermatella”. This “Sandermatella” surname attached to everyone else in the household. No wonder I could not find the family when I searched the “M” Soundex listing.

After misreporting the family surname, this census taker was not finished garbling the record. The mother and eldest daughter were listed correctly as Ada and Martha, but the younger children’s names were confused almost beyond recognition. Aida Sylvia became “Autoulia”; Hugo Alexander became “Hokeselander”; and Peter Bernard became “Petebarkardt”.

I wonder whether the records of other immigrants who lived in the Hibbing area have similar problems. It pays to remember that not all census takers made an effort to complete an accurate report.

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