Ancient Ancestors

Where did my ancestors come from before they lived in Finland?

I know my grandparents were all born in Finland, and all their known ancestors that I know about  were also born in Finland. I will mention that, at the moment, I have 751 individuals in my family tree, and I concentrate on my grandparent's blood ancestors, with just a few individuals that are related only by marriage (such as a great great uncle's wife, or perhaps a second spouse of a widowed ancestor). All the individuals from my grandparent's time and before that I have birth info on were born in Finland, and I do have info on my ancestors that go back centuries, some as far as the 1400s.

Yet, my ancestor had to have come from somewhere before they settled in Finland.

Just for curiosity, I did the Family Finder and Y-DNA tests at Family Tree DNA. The results were interesting, but I wanted more info on my ancestral origins, and uploaded my results to GEDmatch. Playing with my info and the charting available at GEDmatch is quite interesting. This is my favorite so far of all the bits of info I have discovered.

Ancient Ancestors

My big surprise was the 28.2% Natufian in my ancient ancestry! What's this? It definitely wasn't any group of people I had ever heard of, and I was pleased to discover something unexpected in my DNA.

Yes, I looked it up on Google, and here are a couple things that other websites attribute to my ancient ancestors, the Natufians.

Natufians were the first group of people to change from a nomadic lifestyle to a life of settling down and staying in one place.

Natufians founded the Biblical city of Jericho. They originally traveled to this area occasionally because of the Ein es-Sultan spring, where they would stay at times. Eventually they made this a permanent settlement for them. Jericho was founded about 8,000 BC.

1746 Twins at Söder Ena Farm, Finland

I had a nice find today in my family history. My 5th great-grandmother Anna Andersdotter Söder Ena (1746-1823) had a twin brother named Anders!

Anna and Anders Söder Ena are not the first twins I have discovered among my ancestors, but this is the first twins of my Finnish ancestors to live a long life. Anna lived 76 years, and her brother Anders Andersson Söder Ena (1746-1828) lived 81 years!

I was afraid that Anders had a short life and no children, but he didn't! He married and Anders and his wife Anna Davidsdotter (born 1754) had nine children.

It looks like I will be working on twin brother Anders' family as the current part of my family history, gathering and documenting his descendants. It would be nice if I could hope to search for information newer than 1860 on HisKi Project, but that's as far as that website goes for church records from Evijärvi, where they probably spent their whole lives.

Margeta Eriksdotter Slåtte born 1751

My 3rd great great aunt Margeta Eriksdotter Slåtte was born 16 Jan 1751 in Kronoby, Finland. She married Hans Olofsson Rudnäs on 23 Oct 1772 in Kronoby, Finland. It appears they had 11 children from 1776 to 1794, also in Kronoby, Finland, at Rudnäs farm, though I haven't gotten to the stage of verifying those births.

Now, it seems like with all that information on Margeta and Hans, I should be able to discover when they died. No luck yet on that, though. Last night and this morning I spent hours online checking churchbooks and HisKi Project, and not finding when these two died, but at least I know their last child was probably born 17 Feb 1794, so at least I have that to work off of.

There is a Greta Eriksdotter that died in 1832 with a residence of Rudnäs farm, but the age at death is off by a few years. I found that on HisKi Project.

Still, that might be her....

I think it is time to move on to a different ancestor and come back to Margeta and her husband some other day.

Johan Drill 22 July 1778

My 3rd great grandfather Johan Drill was a soldier in Finland, with a birth date of 22 July 1778.

However, his birth name was not Johan Drill, and I've been stumped for quite a while anytime I tried to discover his real name. I better add that soldiers in Finland were assigned new names, and the only reference I was able to find for him for a long time was as Johan Drill.

Last night looking at Finnish church records I discovered that he moved to Ylikiiminki, Finland from Oulu in 1809.

Once I knew where he was from, and already knowing his wife's name and date of their marriage, I searched Oulu, Finland marriages for her, and discovered that when they were married he was still using what I assume was his birth name of Johan Grönlund.

That had been one of those searches that just wasn't going anywhere for a long time. Some times I'd ignore him for a week or more and concentrate on more productive searches on other family members, but I kept going back to him, and finally it paid off!