(Not Finnish as in "finish", but Finnish as in "of Finland" - or "of Soumi," as my new cousins call the place. More on that later.) As I recently commented upon, one of the reasons that my blog has suffered over the past six months has been due to the genealogical research that I've been working on for the past nine months. Becky and I signed up for Ancestry.com and we are making darned certain that the money we shelled out for it is put to good, enlightening and successful use.
ABC has "Brothers and Sisters"; Norway has "-(S)ens and -(D)atters"......
The journey has been fascinating, both rewarding and frustrating. Frustrating in as much as the one line of my family that I really wanted to be able to trace back is that of my father's Norwegian family, the Munson's. However, within the frustration that I feel, even that has been a learning experience for me. I've known for a long time that last names change, either by personal choice or official misrepresentation. Musical artist "Prince" and "Artist Formerly Known as Prince" is one extreme example of someone who did not start life with either one of those monikers. I've also known that the Scandanavian peoples practiced a method of naming that gave a person a first name, but then that name was followed by a two-part name that was not a family name as we understand it. Huh, you say?
Here's how it goes (my understanding): the first part is the person's father's name and the second part meant, depending on the person's gender, either "son of" or "daughter of". Traditionally this meant that a Norwegian named, for example, Lars Jensen, would be "Lars, son of Jen". Lars and his wife might name their son Svein, and he would be known as Svein Larsen. If they had a daughter, she might be named Jorna Larsen. This method of naming is called patrynomic. According to what I've been reading, Norwegians were not required to have a "family name" as we understand it until 1923. (I haven't researched it yet, but I would guess that a similar arrangement held sway in Denmark and Sweden until recent times as well.)
But, if it were all so simple. Two more complications stymie would be amateur genealogists such as moi. First is the tradition of giving a third name based upon the farm or location where one was born or worked. So if good old Svein was Svein Larsen Tveit in some records, that means that he was born or worked on a farm called Tveit or in a locality called Tveit. Over time this could change as well as eventually, at least, people would move around. The second is of a political/ religious/cultural nature. Norway was under the control and influence of Denmark for three centuries from 1523 to 1814, when as a result of the Denmark-Norway combo siding with the wrong side of the Napoleonic wars (i.e. with the guy of small stature with his hand always in his jacket, kids). Then the Swedes exercised a loose union with Norway until 1905. But the important point here is that during the Danish union, the independent Norwegian church was absorbed into the Danish church. Why does this matter? A lot of the clergy coming into Norwegian churches were Danes or, I am assuming, had a great deal of their education in Danish or in Denmark. So if the churches are doing most of the recording of important family facts, guess what is happening to original Norwegian spelling with all this Danish involved!? Yep, things are being spelled according to Danish language rules, not Norwegian.
So where does all this education bring me in my Munson quest? Did I say Munson? Well, unless we're Swedish, in which case all the family history and lore I know of would be uncermoniously dumped off the deep end, we are anything but Munson. What I have discovered is that my great-great-grandfather, Mons E. Monsen (Mons, son of Mon - originality there, eh?), was born in Norway in 1837 and came to the US in 1866, settling first in an area that attracted a large number of fellow Norwegians: Kendall County, Illinois. But, depending how his birth may be recorded in a Norwegian church, he may be any one of the following: Mons Monsen, Mons Munsen, Mons Monssen, etc.
A Finn-y Thing Happened on My Way to the Family Tree
There are some particularly tough genealogical nuts to crack on my Mom's side of the family as well. Among the more enigmatic family lines have been the Morton's, Nelson's and the Archer's. My second cousin Rich has admirably tackled the Mortons and Nelsons and made some headway (but none it seems to link to the family legend of being related to Lord Admiral Horatio Nelson, which would be really cool), but the Archers were a tougher nut to crack.
However, using Ancestry I got lucky and was able to trace the Archers back to a curious sticking point with John Archer, born 1656, and his wife. What rang the bells of strangeness was John's wife's name, which sounded very Swedish. Not that cross-cultural marriages didn't happen, but I hadn't seen any necessarily popping up much in the 17th Century. They were also from an area that was synonamous with the Swedish colony founded on both sides of the Delaware River in the area where Delaware meets Pennsylvania on the west (New Jersey being on the east). I couldn't make any headway with searches for John Archer, so then I turned to John's wife, Gertrude Bertilsdotter. I then discovered that she was married to a guy named Arian Johansson, at the same time as she was married to John Archer??? Huh??? Confusion reigned supreme. Then I concluded that I would Google this Arian Johansson and this led me to a couple of links which explained it all, including this one. Arian did something very American in response to first the Dutch and then the English taking control of what had originally been New Sweden by changing his name - several times!!(And actually, this had already been done for his family once before as the Swedes had a habit of bestowing "easier-to-pronounce" Swedish names on their Finnish subjects!) The entirely cool part is that Johan Grellson (John's father)is considered one of the forefathers of Swedish immigration to the US, and certainly some of the first Finns!
The Power of Two
The power of two, in terms of genealogy is a stunning thing. Think back to a question that you might have been asked sometime in your academic past that went something like the following. What would you rather be paid in a 30-day month: $1 million in a lump sum or one penny on the first day and have that penny double each day for the 30 days. It is amazing that by the 25th day that little ol' doubling process has surpassed the million. By the 30th day whoever is paying you would need to shell out $5,368,709.12. Pretty stunning, eh? Especially when you translate that penny to be you and each successive day is a generation. Those numbers racking up are the number of possible grandparents that you would have in that generation. Here's what the numbers of individuals looks like back to one's 20th Great-Grandparents:
Generation: Number of Ancestors:
1 (You!) 1
2 (Your parents) 2
3 (Your Grandparents) 4
4 (Your Great-Grandparents) 8
5 (Your 2nd Great-Granparents): 16
6 (Etc.) 32
7: 64
8: 128
9: 256
10: 512
11: 1,024
12: 2,048
13: 4,096
14: 8,192
15: 16,384
16: 32,768
17: 65,536
18: 131,072
19: 262,144
20: 524, 288
21: 1,048,576
22: 2,097,152
23: 4,194,304
24: 8,388,608
25: 16,777,216
26: 33,554,432
27: 67,108,864
28: 134,217,728
29: 268,435,456
30: (27th Greats) 536,870,912
See where this is going? The thought of one generation of grandparents adding up to almost half the current population of India is a daunting thought. The numbers also suggest to me that it is thoroughly impossible. To go back thirty generations should put one at roughly 1000 AD. The growth of human population does not run exponentially toward our ancestors, but rather toward us and our descendants. Most of the charts I've been reviewing of the growth of human population suggest that total world population was no more than 500 million at that time. This would hopefully suggest that the various lines of everyone's family trees begin to come back together at various points in history. A simple enough concept, but one that I had, until this point, never truly considered.
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