the pineaway

someone asked me not too long ago, what good was it to me, knowing the names of my ancestors. finding out about the family history, an ongoing and probably neverending mission, has already proven to be so much more than just a pedigree chart with names and dates on it. and i've only begun.

i also don't quite know where to start describing all the aspects of it. i come from a family with lots of painful secrets that were not talked about, understandably so. i will never know the whole truth of the lives of these people who are what i'm made of. but even the fragments i can get a hold of are valuable to me in understanding myself better, seeing myself as a part of something bigger, no matter how dysfunctional at times.

already, i see craftmanship going way beyond the grandparents i know firsthand. from my father's side there are woodworkers, carpenters and a basketweaver in the family. and that's just the men... i'm told my mother's maternal grandfather used to cook up his own cough syrup, leading me to imagine he had an affinity for nature and herbs much like his daughter, then her daughter, and... well, me. that is also where a certain, i'm inclined to say heightened, sense comes from. witchypoo stuff.

speaking of senses, it fascinates me that my other, late grandmother's parents both were deaf and mute. because, although hearing, that branch of the family is not too talkative. quiet, even by finnish standards! considering the times it must be unusual that they married and made a family, moved to a bigger town and built their own house. unfortunately she died when my granny was only four. he lived to almost 86 but i know nothing of his later years yet.

granny's life was not without setbacks. she lost her stepmother too at 12, then was raised by foster parents, possibly relatives. her oldest brother dies in the war, the other ends up in a mental institution. her husband survives the war but takes to drink, then dies in an accident just as her youngest son (my father) is about to leave home. later she buries one of her sons — another sudden, accidental death. and throughout this she remains lively and outgoing until old age, so much so that she breaks a leg falling over because she's too stubborn to accept that aging requires slowing down just a bit. she has an operation go bad and spends her remaining years mostly in a hospital bed. we were never as close as we could've been. she had her moods and i didn't know what i know now... i understand her better. her maiden name, incidentally, translates as 'difficult uphill'. looking further back that lineage, there is at least one other case where father and son both die young, actually within days of each other. could be that they took that name for a reason. maybe it's a curse...

one thing that makes genealogy challenging is that in western finland, where all my family hails from so far, surnames were not commonly used until the eighteen hundreds. and i come from thoroughly common stock, generations of hired help and farmers. just like icelandic names to this day, everyone is just somebody someone's son or daughter, either in swedish or finnish, depending on the parish and the keeper of those records. what initially got me started with genealogy, was to track down my surname... the paternal great grandfather was a mystery man because no one knew where exactly he had been born. finally, in a fit of stubbornness i searched all the church records within that region, parish by parish, based on his birthday. i could only hope that the book would be in the online database, and the microfilm scan legible. once i got to 't' in the list, luck was on my side. turns out he was from where i studied for two years before moving here. and it was while living there that i began this search! eerie... the surname, however, goes no further than him. either he or his parents chose to have that name and i wonder why, because the name is swedish and many actually changed it to a finnish one at the time, the golden age of nationalism and the eve of this land's independence.

so far i can conclude that my roots are deeply southwestern ones, gravitating towards the coast and spreading along the edge of the sea. so it makes sense to me why i want to stay here, why the sea air is so important to me, why i want the simple life. looking at the old photos i see how i'm a patchwork of those before me. i can even tell i'm attracted to the same type of men the women in my family have always been... genetics, eh? even the fragile mind that comes with those building blocks is more reassuring than distressing. it's what i'm made of, among countless other things, and that takes away from the pressure to fight it, giving me permission to grow from and around it.

so, what good is it? a good question. well, besides grounding me physically, emotionally, and even spiritually... all the detective work, solving puzzle after puzzle, is so satisfying and fun that only mushrooming compares!