Uukuniemi.info
Artikkelit - Ihmiset
Sata vuotta sitten Uukuniemen Mensuvaarasta Amerikkaan Massachusettsiin
17.12.2010
Lapualla asuva sukututkija Sirkka Nurmi s. Tuunanen (Uukuniemen Mensuvaarasta) löysi v. 2007 sata vuotta sitten Amerikkaan muuttaneen isänsä Artturin serkun Fabianin suvun sukututkija Sinikka Tuunaisen avustuksella. Fabianin sisaren Anna-Maria Melasen jälkipolvia asuu vielä Uukuniemellä. Toinen sisar Ida Pellikka kuoli Uukuniemellä pian ensimmäisen lapsensa syntymän jälkeen. Vanhemmat Mikko Tuunanen ja Helena Hotta kuolivat lasten ollessa pieniä.
Terveiset saapuvat nyt sukunsa Sirkan aloitteesta v. 2007 Suomesta löytäneiltä "koti-Suomeen" sydämestään ihastuneilta Richard ja Nathan Tuunaselta Massachusettsista ja Floridasta. Rickin toiveena on tulla ensi kesänäkin Suomeen, koska niin paljon jäi näkemättä, kun matka kesti vain viikon. Richard ja Nathan ovat Mikkon ja Helenan neljättä polvea. Helsingissä pojat otti vastaan Juho Koskisen (Halpasilta) tytär Tellervo, jonka kanssa järjestyi upea vierailu Tallinnaan. "Laajennetusta" suvusta vieraanapidosta huolehtivat Helsingissä myös Taito Tuunanen ja Kaarina Tuunanen. Tuunain-suku on lähtöisin Punkaharjulta Tuunaan hovista, joka oli 1500-1600-luvulla ratsutila. Näin kaikki Laatokan ympäristön suvut ovat sukua keskenään.
Toivomuksena on, että myös Anna-Maria Melasen jälkipolvet ja Amerikan "serkunserkunserkut" löytäisivät toisensa Uukuniemi.infon välityksellä. Tänä jouluna 2010 on sukumme näin ison harppauksen verran laajempi. Ilo on meille kaikille suuri.
Sirkka Nurmi
Richard Tuunasen matkakertomus:
I will begin my story in late September 2007. I was working the 3 to 11 shift and one morning was up watching what was to be one of Bob Barker’s final hostings of The Price is Right. The phone began to ring and as I sat pondering whether or not to answer it, did not realize the journey I was about to embark upon.
A woman who didn’t speak English very well was on the other end of the line. She asked me if my last name was Tuunanen and I said it was and she told me that she thinks we may be related. We exchanged email addresses and left it at that.
I got home from work that night to find an email from Sirkka Nurmi. After a few weeks of emailing each other, we came to the conclusion that my great grandfather, Fabian Tuunanen, was Sirkka’s father’s cousin.
Lots of photos and documents such as birth certificates and census reports were exchanged over the next few months. I could see a remarkable likeness in the faces of my old ancestors to mine and my American family’s.
I got in touch with my father and let him know of this connection I had made with Sirkka. We looked through some old family albums and found some pictures of Fabian and his wife Lina and sent them to Sirkka. My father told me stories which had been passed down through the family of Fabian being a wealthy man and owning tens of thousands of acres of farmland in Finland. I often wondered about this and whatever became of this wealth.
As the months passed I became friendly with more of my Finnish relatives through email and the internet. Sirkka has a daughter Marja, who had just given birth to a little girl, Anni.
Anni’s first birthday came on April 25 . I was up in Maine visiting my brother and his family the previous autumn. I bought a small pillow filled with Balsam fir at the Fryeburg Fair which is held at the beginning of October and as a gift, I mailed this to Finland for Anni’s birthday. Shortly after I got an email from her mother with this photo.
I learned that Sirkka’s brother´s son, Eero, has four daughters, Suvi, Paula, Anna and Ilona and they were all on Facebook. I friended them along with Sirkka’s daughter Marja and we began to communicate as best we could. I don’t understand Finnish very well but the curriculum in the school system in Finland is set up so each student must learn some English as it is a widely spoken language, even in Finland. So, with the language barrier being a nuisance, we went forward and became familiar with each others lives.
My cousin Suvi and I had sent email back and forth inquiring about each others lives and I became friendly with her fiancée, Ville Nieminen. As the Beijing Olympics came upon us in the winter of 2008, Ville and I had some common interest to communicate about.
A year later, on May 19, Marja gave birth to another child, Anton. So, little Anni now has a playmate. Marja had figured out that her two children are my fourth cousins, also known as sugarcousins. So Marja is my father’s third cousin.
On November 20, 2009, my cousin Suvi gave birth to her first child, Siiri Sophia.
The years passed as we became more and more familiar with each others lives and one day Suvi had mentioned that I should come and visit Finland. This was an offer that I could not pass up on so I contacted my brother, Bob, to see if he would like to go with me to meet our distant relatives. Bob’s wife, Paulette, was having some health problems and could not be left alone for any length of time so he could not make the trip with me. My father’s brother Michael has a son, Nathan, who is 19 years younger than I am. I am friendly with Nathan thru Facebook and a few meetings while he lived up here in Massachusetts. He and his mother relocated to Florida where they now are living. I told Nathan of the contact I had made with our Finnish relatives and he seemed very interested. We kept in touch over the next year or so learning more about our roots in Finland.
In late 2009 I made a decision that I was going to make the trip to Finland and asked Nathan if he would like to go with me. He seemed very excited about it so we began to make some plans. I contacted Suvi, Marja and Sirkka and asked them for some convenient dates and they all pretty much agreed that anytime was good for them. I was going to have to get two consecutive weeks off from work so I knew May was a month that was good to do this in so I took the first two weeks of May off. I let Nathan know of the dates and he had no trouble getting the same weeks off so we contacted the girls and let them know the dates we had planned and went ahead with our airline ticket purchase.
So the months passed, we all sent each other Christmas cards at the holidays and the New Year brought a lot of good cheer with the anticipation of the upcoming events that the spring would bring. I remember posting a status update on Facebook that read, “50 Days to Finland”. I counted the days from there and every now and then posted another update with the number of days left before my trip. The day I was leaving my status update read, “Next stop, Helsinki.”
About two weeks before Nathan and I were to make our journey back to the homeland, there was a volcano in Iceland that was making a lot of trouble for the air traffic in and around Europe and the Nordic countries. I was worried that my trip would have to be postponed but it all worked out for the best.
So May 3 arrives, I had made arrangements for a limousine to pick up Nathan and I at my home and take us down to Logan Airport. Nathan had been staying at my father’s house so he could see more of the family while he was away from home. My father brought him over to Townsend and the limo driver showed up right on time so we loaded up the car and began our journey back to the homeland.
The limo ride down to Logan Airport in Boston was a very nice touch to start off what would turn out to be an epic event in the lives of many of the Tuunanen family. We were picked up in a nice black Lincoln Continental, very luxurious automobile. We flew on Delta Airlines to JFK Airport in New York City and waited for our connecting flight on FinnAir to Helsinki, Finland. Everything went nice and smooth with the flights and the transfer.
The flight to Helsinki was probably the nicest flight I have been on. The plane was very clean and comfortable, each seat had a monitor for each passenger to watch his own choice of movies. The stewardesses were all lovely Finnish girls who could all speak English along with their native dialect, Finnish. They were extremely accommodating and made the 8 hour flight to Helsinki very comfortable.
I was worried that the jet lag would have an effect on me that might make things a little uncomfortable for a day or two but I think the adrenaline kept me going through the whole trip. We were met at Helsinki's Vantaa Airport by Sirkka’s friend, Sinikka Tuunainen. She was standing with a sign that read “Tuunanen” so it made things very effortless on our part. We loaded our bags in her car and she drove us to the town of Espoo. This was where we would stay with a woman Tellervo Koskinen. She is a local tour guide and knew the local area including Helsinki very well.
We brought our bags into Tellervo’s place and I layed down to have a nap while Sinikka, Nathan and Tellervo went out to do a little sight seeing. After an hour or so they came back and picked me up and we went out to see more of Helsinki.
The next day Nathan and I took a bus to Helsinki which brought us to the Rautateseima, the Railway Station in Helsinki. This was one of my favorite parts of the trip. We walked around Helsinki checking out all the shops and statues for awhile when we got a phone call on the cellphone they had bought for us. It was a man by the name of Taito Tuunanen. Taito is a relation through the Ladogan Carelian Tuunanens, an area in the eastern part of Finland that our ancestors once occupied. He wanted to meet us so we agreed to meet at one of the statues in the city and then afterwards he and his friend Marku Laine took us out to lunch at one of the finest restaurants in Helsinki. We had a nice leisurely lunch and then our two hosts brought us back to Marku’s office at the top of one of the highest buildings in Helsinki. Markku is a prominent financial lawyer in Helsinki and Taito is well known financial advisor in the city. We had quite a view from his office window. He had some very expensive art on his walls and while we were there he gave Taito a birthday gift which was another expensive piece of art.
So with the jetlag and the 7 hour time zone change dragging us down we pushed on through the rest of our first day in Helsinki and then caught our bus back to Espoo. We actually got off one stop too early and had to walk abit to get back to Tellervo’s flat. This being my first trip to Europe I was unfamiliar with how to navigate around a land where you can’t even read road signs. It made it interesting, if nothing else. I actually remember Nathan and I snapping at each other because we were both getting a little irritable. Time to go get some rest.
So we got back to Espoo and didn’t have a lot of time to rest because we were on our next leg of the trip within an hour. Sinikka came and picked us up and we then headed up to Tampere to stay with Marja and Matti for a day.
We arrived at their home and they welcomed us with open arms. The first thing I remember was my little sugar cousin, Anni said something in Finnish about the hat I was wearing. This would soon become my new catch phrase and the title of this story.
Hattu on Musta ! Translation: The hat is black. I was curious about the fascination Anni had with my hat and I soon learned that her favorite cartoon character, Muumi wore the same hat I was wearing. The Moomins are quite popular in Finland and also have a theme park dedicated to them in Naantali, Finland called Moominworld much like Disney World in Orlando, Florida.
Our first night in Tampere Matti took Nathan and I out to a place called “All American Burger”. It is an American themed 1950’s style restaurant, decorated with American nostalgia from the 1950’s era. We got some take out meals and went back to Matti’s house. The burger I ordered was enormous.
The next day came and Marja, Nathan and I got the children into their stroller and walked past a nearby park to the bus stop to catch a ride into Tampere center. We walked around town and looked at some of the buildings with the old architecture and the many waterways that run through the city. Tampere really is a beautiful city !
We went into a shopping mall and I picked out a couple articles of clothing that my neighbor, Debbie wanted me to get for her children. Debbie saw some pictures of Anni when she was dressed in the Finnish style attire and thought it was cute so I told her I would get her something while I was there. I noticed while I was in Finland the women dress in very bright colored clothing. Most of the younger women I saw in Helsinki wore miniskirts with leg warmers due to the cold spring temperatures, very different from what I was used to seeing in the US.
Matti worked somewhere near where we were in Tampere so Marja and he spoke on the phone and made plans to meet up. Marja took the bus back home with the children and Matti took us to a museum where we saw a lot of hockey memorabilia and other history from Tampere. After we finished at the museum he took us to a tower called “Pyyniki Observation Tower”. We climbed the spiral staircase to the top to see some spectacular views of Tampere and the waterways of Tampere. We could see off in the distance, the Tower Nasinneaula. This tower was actually modeled after the Space Needle in Seattle, Washington in the US.
This is a view of the Tower Nasinneaula from the Pyyniki Observation Tower, very much like the Space Needle with spectacular views. It even has a restaurant at the top which rotates 360 degrees every 40 minutes. To the north is Lake Nasijarvi and to the south is Lake Pyhajarvi.
At the base of the tower was a little café where we all sat and had coffee and some pastries before we went back to the house. When we were enroute to Matti’s, he took us for a ride past the new house they had just bought and would move into soon. It is a very nice place with a good size yard for the kids to play in. We also went by the marina and Matti showed us his sailboat.
When we got back to the house we were once again ready to begin the next leg of our journey. Nathan and I packed two of our bags to bring with us up to Kortesjarvi and Marja loaded the carseat in her car. Matti’s parents, Seppo and Ritva had stopped by earlier and took Anni to come visit with them while Marja took Nathan and I to meet more of our family up in Kortesjarvi.
The ride to Ville and Suvi’s was very nice; we saw a lot of the Finnish countryside. Nathan rode up front with Marja driving and I sat in the backseat with Anton in his carseat. While riding up to Kortesjarvi Anton was getting uncomfortable and abit agitated so he began to cry out several times so I had my hands full trying to keep him occupied. I was reading to him from a storybook about the Moomins. “Hattu on Musta” is one of the lines from the book and is now one of my catch phrases. When Anton began to cry Marja would call his name in the most soothing voice and it would quiet him down immediately. It was something to witness.
We arrived at Ville and Suvi’s cottage and I was real impressed with the layout, a long dirt road leading to a small elegant cottage with a small inlaw cabin down closer to the water. Lake Purmojarvi is right in their backyard.
It was nice to watch Suvi and Marja reunite. They had not actually seen each other since they were children. Marja and Ville had never met before this so you can begin to appreciate the depth of this reunion. Marja and Suvi are now new mothers bringing into the world yet another generation of the family.
We had a choice of three different saunas every night we were there. We tried all three of them too. I’ve always heard about people going from cold temperatures to saunas but until you’ve done it, you won’t know what it feels like to be alive.
The first night in Kortesjarvi Suvi took Nathan and I to watch Ville’s football match. Football in Finland is the same thing as soccer in America. That was a lot of fun! Towards the end of the game Suvi took us to a nearby department store so I could find a fishing lure called a Rapala I had promised to pick up for a friend at work.
The next day we were in for quite a treat. We went to an amusement park called Powerpark. We had a great time going on all the rides and just hanging out with Ville and Suvi and their daughter, Siiri.
We went into one of the shops and I bought a bunch of gifts for the family back home. We saw something very funny at the park, behind a fence there was an outhouse but this was not for public use. Every so often the door would swing wide open and there was a mannequin sitting on the toilet cussing in Finnish.
While Suvi waited with Siiri in the stroller, Ville, Nathan and I had a wild ride on the bumper cars.
This next picture is of Ville and Nathan with the park and some rides in the background.
We had a great time at Powerpark and then went back to their cottage to rest and have some dinner and await our next surprise. People started showing up at the cottage, faces I had seen only in pictures and on Facebook. This was my family, my relatives from the land where my roots first stemmed. My great grandfather Fabian Tuunanen and his wife Lina had left Finland in 1893 to find a better life in America and these were the offspring of the offspring of the family he had left behind.
We all had a big dinner and tried to make small talk as much as we could. It was difficult with the language barrier. Suvi and Ville were probably the most fluent in English so they made things more comfortable for Nathan and I. I actually remember sitting out on the back porch having a cigarette and a beer with my cousin Paula’s husband Heikki and I don’t think a word was spoken. We all understood the barrier and just made the best of it. It was just very nice to be in the company of my newly discovered relatives.
So, on the guest list was Helvi Teppo, Suvi’s grandmother, Tapio and Sirkka Nurmi, Suvi’s aunt and uncle, Tuula Tuunanen, Suvi’s mother, Heikki and Paula Hautala, Suvi’s sister and brother in law and their two boys Lauri and Eeli and our hosts Ville Nieminen and Suvi Tuunanen.
The next day we also had something special in store for us. We slept in after a long arduous day before and had a nice breakfast with Ville and Suvi. After Ville and I did a little fishing we packed up the car and headed down to Kauhava where Suvi’s parents, Eero and Tuula lived. This was to be the more formal gathering but I did not realize that and was probably the most casually dressed. We arrived and there were several family members there who we had met the previous day. There were also a few that I was meeting for the first time. Suvi’s father, Eero was the first one I had a chance to talk to. We stood outside and I had a cigarette while he smoked a cigar. He was not very fluent in English but we managed to get a few ideas across. He asked me why I was not married at my age and I told him about a head injury I had suffered in my teenage years and how I thought I was better off not having to deal with the stress of family life. Then he asked me about meeting a Finnish girl and this really set my mind to thinking.
How nice that would be to come home to the land of my ancestors and find love.
Sirkka and Tapio were not at this gathering but her sister Seija was there with her husband Evert. This woman Seija was the sister of Suvi’s grandfather Rauno, very nice woman, she talked to just about everyone there.
All three of Suvi’s sisters were at this gathering, Anna and her husband Harri Jaakkola, Paula and Heikki, and the youngest of the three Ilona. I was very impressed with the beauty these women possessed. I had grown up with two brothers, five male cousins from my mothers side and my only cousin on my father’s side, Nathan and didn’t know of any female members of our family. It was a very nice surprise to find we have such lovely women in our bloodline.
There were a lot of old photo albums brought out and we could see quite a resemblance in the facial features of our ancestors to our present family. I even remember Helvi holding up a book next to Nathan’s face to compare to one of our relatives from many years ago. This was really a huge event in the lives of many of our family. The language barrier presented some problems but Suvi and Ville helped Nathan and I when we had trouble. I remember Suvi’s posting on Facebook just before we arrived at her house about having to speak English for the next few days. I had no problem communicating with her at all and she even came to my rescue several times at these reunions. This was Ville’s first time meeting alot of these people also.
Ville, Suvi, Nathan and I headed back to Kortesjarvi and tried out the third of their three sauna’s. After we just sat back to rest and played a version of the American game “Trivial Pursuit”. This was interesting because Nathan and I had no knowledge of anything Finnish. All things considered we did quite well.
Nathan and I had planned on returning to Tampere to spend more time with Marja and Matti but we got a phone call at Suvi’s Sunday from Marja. She thought it would be best if we did not return to Tampere because the whole family had gotten sick. We had left one each of our bags there so we made plans for Matti to meet us at the train station in Tampere with our bags and we would continue our trainride back down to Helsinki.
Monday morning came and Ville was off to school and Suvi took us down to the Railway Station in Kuahava. We stopped by her sister Paula’s house on the way to the train station to have some coffee and pastries.
We got to the railway station and had to wait awhile for the train so we went inside the station and took a few last pictures. Then we were off to Tampere to meet Matti at the train station. The ride down to Tampere was real nice, the Finnish countryside is something to see.
We got to Tampere and Matti was waiting for us with our bags. We said our goodbyes and went into a local restaurant to have some dinner. Our trainride back to Helsinki was not for another hour so we had some time to have a nice meal.
So we had our meal and went back to the train station and awaited our next leg of the journey. The train ride back down to Helsinki was another nice trip. I had a seat across from two soldiers from the Finnish Army and had a nice conversation with them. They were headed down to Helsinki for a little R and R.
We got to Rautatesiema in Helsinki and waiting there to pick us up was Sinikka Tuunainen. She drove Nathan and I back to Tellervo’s flat where we just rested for the rest of the day. We didn’t really have any idea of what to expect because we had our plans changed and didn’t know what was in store for us. We were in for quite a surprise when we woke up the next morning. Tellervo had made plans for the three of us to take a cruise down to Estonia. Tallin, Estonia is a very old city just south of Helsinki.
We got up the next morning, had some breakfast and took the bus down to the docks where the Viking cruiseline launched from. The ship was enormous with 9 or 10 floors. Everything you ever needed was on this ship from shops to dining, bars, entertainment such as live music, hundreds of staterooms. This was my first time on a cruiseship and it was one of the finest ships built by man. Helsinki, Finland builds the nicest cruiseships in the world.
Nathan and I were like two little boys running around the ship. Up and down, all over the ship, I think we covered just about every inch of the boat. We even found a door that led out onto the deck and went outside. It was extremely cold out on the deck but we went from one end the boat to the other on the deck. After we went back inside and split up and went our separate ways. I ran into Tellervo walking around the ship and we went into a big dining room and had a real nice meal. It was a buffet style setup so I filled my plate with all kinds of foods I didn’t recognize. I tried three different types of caviar and some salmon which I would later regret.
A man that was sitting close to Tellervo and I noticed my English dialect and asked where I was from. I told him I was from the United States and this led me into the whole story of my Finnish relatives. I kind of got the idea he was sorry he asked.
We got to Tallin, Estonia and what a great day we had walking around the city seeing the old buildings. This city was 500 years old ! My country is just over 200 years old. We went into a lot of shops and little cafes. The merchants were all dressed in the old Victorian style attire, it was quite an experience. In the middle of all these old buildings I saw something I never would have imagined I would see, a McDonald’s fast food restaurant.
We ended up walking up to a vista viewpoint where we had a nice view of the entire city. I met a man up there selling CD’s of Finnish music so I bought one from him.
It was a great trip to Estonia that was completely a surprise to us. On our boat ride back to Helsinki we ended up in a bar and had a couple beers to settle us down. I was up at the bar getting two beers for Nathan and I and as I stood in line waiting to be served, I struck up a conversation with a woman standing behind me. We ended up doing a shot of Jack Daniels together.
We got back to Helsinki and took the bus back to Espoo where Tellervo’s flat is and just rested for the rest of the night.
That night I was going to pay for eating all the caviar and fish. I was up vomiting two or three times and when I woke up I was not in very good shape. We had plans of meeting Sirkka and some ladies in Helsinki but I was thinking about canceling and letting Nathan do it alone. I got out of bed and went outside and had a cigarette and started to move around a little. I started feeling better the more I moved around so I figured this is a once in a lifetime vacation so I would tough it through the day.
Nathan and I took the bus to Helsinki and met Sirkka and we had yet another surprise waiting for us, with Sirkka were two women. One of the women was Kaarina Tuunanen, another distant relative of ours from the Karelian part of eastern Finland. Kaarina is a well know actress and dancer in Helsinki. Marjukka Englund was the third woman, Marjukka was to be our translator for the day as she was fluent in both Finnish and English. Sirkka and Kaarina spoke very little English.
Helsinki has a lot of history we learned that day. We went and visited a church that was built into the side of a huge rock. Marjukka told us a story about the people living in the area not wanting to put a church in the area so it was built into the rock.
We learned a lot about the rich history of the city and the ties it has to our family. Marjukka was a wonderful woman and a great host.
We finally went to the downtown section and walked through the city and saw the real beauty of Helsinki. The weather was almost perfect for our last day in Finland.
I did a lot of shopping for souvenirs on my last day there. I made sure I had a lot of things to remind me of my trip to Finland. On our walk through the city we stopped at a little café and sat and had coffee and Marjukka bought me a fruit salad that woke me right up and made the rest of my day much easier to deal with.
After our day with the ladies we got back on the bus and went back to Espoo. We had a funny thing happen on our last bus ride, the woman driving the bus was apparently not having a good day. We were counting out bus fare and this woman starting cussing at us in Finnish because we didn’t have the correct change. I could see by the reactions of the other passengers that it was causing quite a commotion but when you are in a foreign country and don’t know the customs I guess this is what you get.
We got off at our stop and went back to Tellervo’s place. Later on that afternoon we decided to go for a walk around the neighborhood. There was a college nearby so we walked around the campus and saw a bunch of college kids drinking beer and hanging out. I was tempted to approach them but I think my wisdom won out over my curiosity.
The next day Sinikka came to Tellervo’s flat and took us to Vantaa Airport to make our journey home to the US. It was a nice flight back to the US and it was nice to get back to our own time zone. We had a little trouble with our changeover in New York but we made it back to Boston on time and had a limo waiting for us to take us back to Townsend. The ride home was not as good as the ride down to the airport. I think the driver was probably a taxi driver at one point in his career. I thought about calling the limousine company and telling them about it but in this economy I’d hate to be responsible for somebody losing their job.
Fabian was born 1893 and went 1809 to USA!
Lisää artikkeleita aiheesta Ihmiset
Artikkelit - Pääsivu
