Logs Buried in the Grass

Somewhere around Oulu it struck me. I was about to see where my family came from.

The farm that is there was built in a hamlet called Simo in the grand duchy of Russia the mid 19th-century. Family records place us as a people further back than that on that same piece of land.

That piece of land has been battered about under political rule by nearby Sweden and further-but-more-imposing Russia, for most of its modern political history. So at the time of its construction, the Salmela farm land in Simo was in Russia, after essentially being in Sweden for centuries.

As the Bolsheviks bloodied the earth hundreds of kilometers east with a decisive overthrow of the Tsars and Russian bourgeoisie, the Finnish people saw their chance for independence from Russia and they won it. The year 1917 is a big one in history. Nowhere is it bigger than in Finland. But by then, the Salmelas of Simo had already spread to the New World.

As our brief, overnight visit to Simo unfolded, we tried to wrap our minds around how exactly we related to our hosts with the same last name—Salmela—“of the strait” or “by the strait .” Salmi a strait—as in water/land feature—conjugates with an i turning to an e to welcome the suffix, “la” as a preposition. La is “of” or “by the,” Salm(i/e); the strait itself.

Elisa Salmela, like me, the great great great grandchild of Kalle Salmela(I), was one of our three gracious hosts for the night, along with her parents and property owners, Kalle (III) and Liisa. She invited us a few days prior after seeing on Facebook we were going to Rovaniemi to Mimmu’s nephew’s graduation. We met and hosted them a little over a year ago in Duluth. She insisted we stop for dinner, which slid into sauna, an overnight, and breakfast at the Salmela farm where it all began for this family.

After a wonderful salmon dinner and sauna, Elisa, Mimmu, and I, bantered into the evening as Taavi and Iita nodded off to bed, about how family trees work and where the missing pieces of our common tree connects or remains fuzzy. That was a mind-bender. I think the gravity of how family trees work over just a few generations raised perhaps more questions than answers, and left us feeling awed by how the interactions of our ancestors affected everyone to come in their wake.

Their beautifully-set cabin perched on a rocky patch of seaside very near the northernmost apex of the Gulf of Bothnia, had a rugged, northern, rocky toughness about it, softened by the soothing low sunlight angles of a reticent, salmony sunset to the west, sublime in its interplay with the reflection of black coastline and islands against the ethereal glow of it all off the gulf’s quicksilvery surface. The spot we came to have salmon, sauna, and share Salmela stories, is one of the northern most, south-facing seaside coastlines in the inhabited world.

Swimming in the Gulf of Bothnia, strait out of the sauna, conjured up images of my ancestors doing the same in that very same place. I asked Elisa if generations of Salmelas swam there. She thought probably not. She wasn’t sure of the family’s acquisition of the cabin’s land, but said the gulf in the time of the farm being established went way further inland than it does today, and the land we were on was probably even still underwater in Kalle I’s time.

It’s probably time to introduce the Kalles. “Kalle I” (b. 1845), Carl Eric Salmela, built the Salmela farmstead that stands today. Two other Kalles follow in this string—Kalle II was Kalle III’s uncle and brother of Veikko, Kalle III’s dad and Elisa’s grandpa. Kalle II died young in the winter war against the Soviet Union. Thanks for his military service is framed and signed by Mannerheim himself, and is displayed on a desk in the farm house. Kalle III is Elisa’s dad who was hosting us and owns the Salmela farm now. We pretty much deal only with Kalle I and III here.

The explanation of the gulf actually has to do with our family name. I’m unsure if this will be sound history, but it’s fun, so we’ll proceed at least. Besides, it’s just a blog if I am off just a bit.

I didn’t notice a “strait” per se anywhere near the Salmela farm, where we had breakfast and a tour the next morning. The “strait” has been a common theme battered around our family most of my life as we’ve tried to intuit clues about its origin. So “the strait” has always been kind of a big deal in envisioning who we are. Nobody in our American family had ever had a visual of the Salmela place until they met Kalle III and Liisa in Simo in the past few decades. I’m not the first of the American Salmelas here either. In fact, I’m the last, so far. My parents, uncles, and aunts have all been here, so I’m no Amerigo Vespucci of the American Salmela clan. I might just be the first to try to write about it and post it online.

Back when it all started, the farm was certainly much closer to the coastline than it is today, so that’s a key component to our family name. With land lower and coast further inland, the first Salmela farm was by a strait that’s simply not there anymore. The land has risen since then. The Salmela farm is currently several kilometers from the Kalle III Salmela cabin on the gulf, but the name originated from a now-phantom strait. It feels also very transient, doesn’t it? You’d think uncovering the history of your family name would feel set in stone. Solid. Ours vanished with a shift of the land and sea, like a myth.

According to Elisa, Kalle III’s family tree shows the Salmela name started with Eric Salmela, born in 1774. (BTW, Chad Eric Salmela was born in Virginia, MN in 1971, so I’m unknowingly partially a namesake for the first Salmela born 197 years prior) Eric’s house was built near the farm house that Kalle I built in the mid 1800s—the one still standing today. Eric was as many times a great Grandpa to Kalle I as Kalle I is to me. Wrap your mind around that for a moment, and consider the number of and where else in the world Eric’s descendants are. One of the footprints stretches to northern Minnesota and to me.

I submitted my undergraduate history thesis on ethnic identity 20 years ago in May. Ethnic identity has run to some extent in my pure-bred Finnish-American family, perhaps stronger than many 3rd- and 4th-generation ethnic Americans. In the absence of truly living the ethnic culture, ethnic identity gets weaker and further from the real, lived thing with each passing generation. As cultural backgrounds mix with intermarriage, the ethnic identities often weaken more, if not disappear altogether along with it. That’s only logical. But sometimes logic skips, and certainly pure-ethnic heritage has more of a chance long term.

Calling hot cereal “puuro,” or slippers “tossu’s,” hardly makes me Finnish. But as token and watered down as these pet cultural practices were growing up, they become MORE important in maintaining the identity, not less, even though they weaken, get distorted, and often don’t even resemble anything “really” Finnish at all.

If you think of the pathway Finnish culture filtered down to me while actual modern Finland emerged, the strings between Finnishness and Finnish-Americanness get strained further with each passing year, until, without border-shrinking technology, they’ve become barely related at all. Technology has strengthened some of those weaknesses, but I’m still very much American regardless how Finnish I intend to be.

The ideal behind Finnish-Americanness is rooted in Finnish customs and costumes of the 1890-1910s. Finland and America both have changed so drastically in the time since, that Finnish-Americanness really is almost a time capsule—a museum of a cultural microcosm long gone and very loosely related to the life my wife lived since being born in 1974 Finland. While she appreciates and enjoys Finnish American festivals and activities, they aren’t exactly genuine to her, and in many cases, they aren’t even familiar. They would only be genuine to a generation who has long since passed on.

Over a century has passed since Kalle I’s son Richard migrated to Tower, Minnesota. Richard’s brother Ullrich went too, after Richard had settled, but moved back to Simo to marry a long-time sweetheart and run the Simo farm. We don’t know exactly why he went nor why he came back—was it just to make money and marry upon return or were other factors like primogeniture at play? Regardless, that legacy met last week as Ullrich’s and Richard’s great grandchildren sat around a table in Kalle I’s farm house for breakfast. No matter how you might feel about your ancestry, the gravity of it hits you when you put it all together and sit in that room.

When you go four generations deep with the same ethnicity running on both sides of the family, many of those token cultural tidbits have been the entirety of one’s Finnishness. I approached my college thesis with quite a bit of vigor because I was interested in why some late-generation folks held onto their ethnic identity when others don’t. Further, my ethnicity probably had some factor in me falling in love with my Finnish wife, which led to my Finnish children, which led to us taking some shelter in Finland during this crazy global time. As weak as the cultural ties have been to Finnishness over my lifetime, they hold something over us in our hearts and minds, for at least some of us. That’s my thesis at least. And these weak links ultimately led me to my Finnish wife, my Finnish kids, and to Simo, my family’s beginning. It’s a full circle.

I’d characterize my personal relationship with my ancestry to date as more academic than sentimental. Still, I think most people approaching their ancestral genesis might find themselves at least a shade or two more sentimental than normal when they crossed it. I did. I wasn’t really blown away as much as moved by the roots I’d uncovered in a huge old tree. Big ones. The kind that poke up through the sod 20 yards from the trunk and look like logs buried in the grass.