Genealogy update — 01jan26

Those who have been around here know that my mother was born out of wedlock and fathered by a man whom I only have the barest of information about. While it might have been nice to know more about him over the years, the only real incentive to fining out more about him was the surprise DNA results my mother got back, putting her at 33% Finn, something none of us suspected.

Running her DNA through an algorithm, there was an additional surprise: That some of that Finnish background may actually be Sámi, the reindeer herders of the area. So I set out to see if I could find out more about my grandfather, who’s ghost seemed to be hellbent on avoiding discovery. I eventually gave up the hunt as a lost cause when all roads ended up in dead ends about the man.

Until Andrea showed up in one of my DNA services.

Andrea is a half-first cousin (most likely of the possible combinations for our likely relative ages), which means we shared the same grandfather. A silver bullet? Perhaps.

I reached out to her twice via the messaging service and received no responses back, although I said I had no interests in anything other than positively identifying my grandfather and looking upstream on the ancestry river.

However, I had her last name and a likely relationship. I knew where my grandfather was at during the time my mother was conceived and I had a (possibly assumed) name to attach to him. Did she have any likely connections to a man who shared my grandfather’s used name? I wondered.

I recently purchased a new phone and it gave me access to premium AI services (Gemini). I wondered if the advanced AI model could find something I had overlooked. So I asked if it could find a public, online connection between her and my grandfather. After narrowing down the criteria (location, approximate age of my grandfather and known likely boarding facility where my grandmother worked), it came up with a solid match, using knowledge I did not previously have at my disposal. I confirmed their connection in a number of ways (to see if it was a hallucination on the part of the AI). The more I checked, the more the evidence reinforced their connection.

I checked some of my own assumptions made prior to this experiment, which AI independently confirmed were accurate (I did not use leading questions in my chat). Then I asked it to look upstream to see if we could confirm things from that direction because it bothered me that the man had a Scottish surname for being very Finn (at least 66% to fit the math).

Turns out (again, this was news to me), that the common way to mask Sámi and/or Finn background was those immigrants to assume British- and Scottish- sounding phonetic equivalences for their surnames when coming to the US at the time.

And, oh, by the way, AI told me… his parents lived in a Finnish stronghold less than 100 miles away where he was known to live and about 50 miles from where my mother was raised. And, hey, his known grandparents listed their mother tongue in census records around 1890 as Finnish.

So I finally have a likely family tree after several hours of research that goes back to my great-great grandparents, a place where they immigrated to (which is a town previously known for mining converted to skiing slopes) that I have visited numerous times in my earlier life. The answers might have been there all along, just waiting for someone to ask. I had overlooked some trails leading away from the dead ends.

Grandma refused to talk about him while she was still alive, so I had almost zero to go on.

I may do some additional research. While it is still early, I am very tempted to drive out to that place in Montana and do some digging around in the physical records and public files to see what I can uncover about my family and confirm, if for no other reason that to satisfy curiosity, maybe unlock who they were before they came over as immigrants and solve some of those mysteries as well.

Besides, for all my joking with the family, it might be good to get back out there and investigate the idea of buying the old ranch house from my relatives, there are times that living under mountains sounds better than living under skyscrapers and it might be up for sale in the future to “the right buyer”.