I drastically overestimated the energy I would have for writing while away on a 3.5 month work trip. To be fair, I also cannot do math when time is involved and "12+ hour days" didn't really sink in.
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The wildest thing to me has not so much been that this is true about my family, but that I wouldn't even know if I hadn't been trying to write fiction and gotten ADHD distracted looking at a tree of different Laestadian schisms in America. All that history & survival, unknown....
But uh, yeah. So my great grandmother's family was Sami. It's something I'm honestly still processing because I had exactly 0 idea.
But it's different to think of this vast history that I was never told, the one that counteracts the "your ancestors chose to immigrate and where they were from is another country that is bounded by internationally recognized borders.
- based on a little stretch of DNA and nothing else. I know better than that. And I don't know exactly how 23 & me handles the predictions - I mean I have some idea from trying for ( and failing) that Genetics PhD.
When I first spit in a tube for 23 & me, I thought through A LOT of stuff first. For instance: I promised myself that even if they came back with a minute hint of North American ancestry I absolutely was not going to become one of those white ppl who claim to be Native American
Eventually my great grandmother married a Finnish man from Alavus and they moved to nearly the mouth of the Columbia when my grandmother was 3.
A collection of so many ethnic groups that governments and outsider neighbors tried to wipe out or assimilate - they came together in mid to late 19th century Minnesota and Michigan and Wisconsin with LARGE families.
A branch of the family that moved between inland and northern coastal Sápmi, who left Norway for America when the laws banned Sami and Kven people from owning land.
There are the Karelians. There are Tornedalians - one family surname is the Meänkieli word for forest. There are notes in church records. L. Skogsame (forest sami) as an occupation listed in what is now considered northern Sweden.
The records just kept going north and north and north the further back I went, except for the branch that was in Kuusamo prior to the Swedish king trying to get more non-Sami settlers to move to the area. They survived a massive MASSIVE late 17th century famine, btw.
My great grandmother, the one whose brother founded his own Laestadian offshoot in Minnesota? Those records plus looking up the locations taught me more about Finnish and Sami history than any number of books I've read.
Well, Finland is a different situation, turns out. And there are records. There are hundreds of years of records. There are hundreds of years of records about where my Finnish family came from and it turns out the Alavus story was just my grandmother's father's family.
What I didn't expect - partly because previous records searches involve utterly failing to find any record of my Italian great-grandfather "legally" entering in Ellis Island, I just assumed I wouldn't find much.
My ability with Finnish is limited to being able to check out at a grocery store w/o any English and recognizing loan words from some other languages. Not super impressive, but that's what I'm working with. Apparently it's enough.
Except it was kind of like when you have a sore in your mouth and you just keep poking it with your tongue. I've been kinda digging in free time, you know, in case there are records.
My grandmother is currently alive but not able to answer questions like that anymore. So, I was like, okay. Interesting side track, but probably not anything of interest and/or I'll never know.
I asked my mother if my grandmother had ever said anything about being Sami - although I used an archaic term because my grandmother has never been up on social justice. No, my mother said, not that she could recall.
What you've probably guessed, reader, is that no, it was not a coincidence that I found that name on that branch, and it was the name of my grandmother's uncle whom she was extremely not fond of for Reasons that involve generational trauma that I am still processing privately.
An aside here: 23 & me has, now that they break some locations into regions, put a general haze of "idk probably somewhere around here" over Northern Scandinavia but I'd chalked that up to statistical stuff they'd eventually fix - my grandmother TOLD me where we're from...
Okay, I thought. It's probably a super common Finnish surname or something. Plus, the story I had been told by my grandmother was just that the family came from Alavus, which is not super far north.
This particular branch of Christianity appears to have undergone a LOT of schisms, including in the US. In Minnesota, especially. What I absolutely did not expect was to find one of the surnames from the Finnish side of my family as a founder of one of those tiny branches.
At one point I went down a slight rabbit hole of reading about the Laestadian movement - short SHORT version is a Swedish Sami Lutheran minister essentially started an offshoot of Lutheranism that first really took off in Sami communities.
I started reading more about the Sami culture because unlike the northern part of North America, I have physically been to Sápmi and I spent 9 months in southern Finland. So I have an idea of what the landscape is like, the quality of light, the plant life, etc.
But I have a lot of way of life questions regarding day to day things... what would be reasonable and plausible, how much time do you need to spend daily doing x, y, z, who does what work, etc.
I'd always planned on the protagonist of this epic fantasy having had backstory in which he spent his childhood in a circumpolar/arctic sort of environment, but then realized I wanted to write that as part of the book rather than allude to it.
I've had the particularly strange situation happen in which I was doing writing research that I thought was "writing the other" for this book, and then it turned out to be, well, surprise! It's literally also the history of my own family and ancestry.
