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!

Last Names In Finland

Last night while working on one pair of my 3rd great grandparents I had more than my usual amount of confusion as I started out.

I felt fairly confident that my 3rd great grandfather's name was Johan Andersson Luomanperä.

Yet I found references to what I believed was him listing him as Johan Andersson Herlefvi and also Johan Andersson Huhtakangas. Adding to my confusion was that he was from Ullava, Finland. I had no other ancestors from this town.

Could this be the same person?

Yes! What we think of today as a permanent last name was, in the time of my 3rd great grandfather the name of the farm they lived on.  If they moved to a different farm, they took that farm name as their "last name".

Usually my male ancestors were born, lived their lives, and died on the same farm. Not so with Johan, and that added over an hour to my research just trying to convince myself that these three names referred to the same person.