Thinking About Genealogy

What Keeps those Family Researchers Employed?

Some time ago, my ten-year-old grandson, who shares the Sundwick family name, asked me where the Sundwicks came from. His dad referred him to me. Unfortunately, I had only a vague understanding myself of our family’s origins. What I knew came from my late cousin John (also a Sundwick) who anointed himself the family genealogist. But his work was never completed.

All I ever received from him were copies of some documents from nearly fifty years ago. He had, indeed, pursued family origins with the Vaasa, Finland local archives, and once took a trip to the putative family origin in Munsala Parish, formerly (19^th century and before) part of the “Ostro-Bothnian” Swedish-speaking region of Finland. Anders Wilhelm Sundwick (Sundvik when he arrived on U.S. shores in 1898) was one of many immigrants to the U.S. from that region, along with his sister (who also apparently changed her maiden name to Sundwick after getting married).  More to the point, I never knew my grandfather (he died in 1933), my father never discussed him, and stories from the aunts whom I did know (he had eight children!) vary enough to be intellectually unsatisfying. I don’t know why he came to North America, what drew him to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, or more importantly, how he earned a living in that underpopulated area – enough to support a wife and eight children, who eventually became solid middle-class adults in mid-century America.

The most interesting story for me is how he led his life – not his ancestors’ lives. Now all those eight offspring are gone as well. I should search archives and newspapers from Houghton and Hancock, Michigan, and a few other Northern Michigan communities where they lived for the information I seek. But, alas, my own life has diverged enough from those extended family members that it is unlikely I will embark on such a project. My grandson may be left with the same mysteries about the family that I have.

First, regarding the name, there is that famous problem with Swedish surnames. The patronymic model makes extended genealogy difficult, to say the least. That document John left me does identify one “Pehr Wigg (later Smed)” from the Ostro-Bothnian region, born apparently in 1754, died 1832 – the earliest recorded family progenitor. He was identified as a “soldier” but “smed” means smith in Swedish, implying his trade. I have also gleaned online that place names were frequent sources of family names (close second to patronymics?). And, lo and behold, the Swedish Finn Historical Society’s web site does link to names of individual farms in Munsala Parish villages. And two of those farms, in the church village (“Kyrkobyn”), were Sund and Vik. Letters “v” and “w” were apparently interchangeable prior to the 19^th century revisions to Swedish orthography – could this shed light on “Wigg” somehow transforming to “Vik,” then back again to “wick”? Don’t know, but do I even care?

And here is the basic issue with genealogy. One can invest a lot of time (and money?) in such things as orthography and place names. But if you conclude that your ancestors were really pretty ordinary folks, tenant farmers, not landowners, blacksmiths, not business owners, then what percentage is there in learning more definitive history going back many generations? The Sundviks were not nobility or even an Ostrobothnian bourgeoisie. And today it seems the whole Ostrobothnian realm has largely dissipated (far fewer Swedish speaking Finns than in the 19^th century).

No, my interest may be piqued by the history of only two generations back – in Northern Michigan, not Finland. I have a hard time getting excited about those things that motivated Cousin John in the 1970s and ‘80s. None of my Sundwick cousins have approached me since John’s death in 2023, either. Though I haven’t exactly taken any initiative with them. I did join the Swedish Finn Historical Society (SFHS, in Seattle) but haven’t submitted any genealogical inquiries to them. If my grandson pushes me, I might. Otherwise, I can only speculate on the true appeal of genealogical research.

It seems that, since there’s no value in tracing genetic lines except for certain diseases (none in me), and there certainly is no family wealth that has carried forward for two centuries, nothing substantive is left of those rural Finnish beginnings. While true that I remember two aunts telling me about how, when they were growing up in Northern Michigan, they were indoctrinated in some definite anti-Finnish prejudice (relating this to me in the context of American civil rights struggles of the 1960s), I presume it might trace to that Swedish-speaking minority status from Munsala Parish, perhaps transferred with immigration waves to the Upper Peninsula where the Sundwick family settled. It had some small impact on me – but nothing like the obvious racial animus I saw all around me in Flint, since the great migration of Southern Blacks to the auto factories. My Sundwick relatives seemed to have no qualms about identifying as White American citizens in what my non-Swedish Preacher’s Kid (PK) mother considered clearly immoral, and disgusting, racist behavior — she would have been an abolitionist a hundred years earlier. I believe she thought she was better than the Sundwick clan but somehow considered my dad to be a worthy project for reform (see my last post, “Engineering Values and Virtue”).

Sure, genealogical research may enlighten people about the many sociological and behavioral idiosyncrasies they may recognize in their families, but like most history, it is just a story. It may or may not be the real “source” of family peculiarities that we remember from our childhood. Although it can be a fertile source for something like conspiracy theories, my view is that whatever idiosyncratic behaviors one may notice in even a large extended family (like mine) can easily be explained by the lived environment members of the family have experienced. Those stories of anti-Finnish prejudice may have been projected from the contemporary 1960s American social milieu. Since I can’t transport myself back in time and place to Ostrobothnian Finland of the 1890s, and since the extant documentation for such ordinary folks as the tenant farmers and tradesmen of Munsala is likely near zero, it seems that fiction could be a more productive vehicle, not historical research.

We’ll see. I have no plans to travel to Finland — as Cousin John did.

— William Sundwick