I Don't Know my Ancestors and They Never Met me blog.timokoola.com
@tkoola 1. My grandparents. 2. Can't say - grand-grand parents perhaps. 3. Can't say. 4. Apparently my grand-grandmother refused to cook on a stove, she didn't allow a stove in the house as long as she was alive, she used open fire. 5. Can't say. 6. Can't say.
All, since the 1600s, they all lived within radius of 30km. My grandfather, who I never met, seem to have had the same interests as me.
@jemostrom Interesting! Same answer for first question, for most others I have no idea. I think Swedish and Finnish churches made people read relatively early and universally by making reading skills a requirement for e.g. marriage. My families have probably lived on pretty small areas from at least three generations ago, but my parents already come from different parts of Finland (culturally)
@tkoola Yep, I know that my grandfather was considered a "wise man" in the area where he lived (handled a lot of paperwork for the people in the region). And I have some papers from his grandfather and grand grandfather but I don't know if he actually wrote it himself ... I assume that they signed them but who actually wrote them 🤷🏻
@tkoola @jemostrom Finns call this "kinkerit" Husförhör – Wikipedia and it has existed at least on 19th century probably already earlier
@tkoola For most of these I'd have to look farther back than I'm able: past my great-grandparents' generation. Probably some of my great-grandparents couldn't read.
"Didn't have a job": the way it's put, I think you mean "lived outside the money economy." I wonder where housewives fit in this? My mother was a housewife when I was little, and I doubt that either of my grandmothers ever "earned" any meaningful amount of money, but their labor was obviously essential to family functioning.
@tkoola Yep, I assume this happened here also. What I don't know if how it was enforced, some people lived pretty far away (assuming winter and a lot of snow) from the main village. Perhaps a teacher/priest that moved around 🤷🏻
@jemostrom This reminds me: Have either one of you seen “A Chinese Ghost Story”? Great movie! @tkoola
@jemostrom The main character is a tax collector. In my country we’ve had censuses back to the mid-late 1800s at least. I have my mother’s ancestry figured out back to the 1600s I think, but my father’s only back to my great grandfather’s parents.
@JMaxB I think "participated in money economy" captures the spirit of the question perfectly. I think most post-industrial housewives or -husbands still do participate the money economy even if nobody directly pays for their contribution. I think it must be several generations back before someone appears that didn't at least occasionally exchange something to/for money
@tkoola That is an interesting bunch of questions, and I don't actually know the answers to most of them for my ancestors (but I can guess that my great-great-grandfather who was German is the most recent to speak a language unintelligible with my own 😜). I do know there's a bit of a barrier to tracing lineages back, in that it's relatively easy to find records of people in Australia, but going further back to their parents or beyond in Europe is much harder. So I don't really know what kinds of lives my ancestors lived there, even immediately before immigrating here.
@tkoola I think I agree about housewives and the money economy. Even if my grandma never made a dime, she was part of a family unit that depended on money (provided by grandpa in the old model) - a division of labor within the money economy.
@tkoola Interesting questions! I can't answer all of them, but I know my maternal great-great grandparents (so, 4 generations before me) were farmers and my paternal great-great grandparents probably didn't speak English.
@jayeless I think these are even more interesting for someone with a relatively recent immigrant in the family. Who was the last one to speak German in your family? I have relatives in US migrating in 30’s that stopped speaking Finnish in second generation
@tkoola My German great-great-grandfather married an Anglo-Australian woman here, so I suspect English was their main home language. They did follow that traditional German naming convention (where all sons/daughters share the first name of their dad/mum and it's their middle names that are unique) for their kids, so I suppose it's possible my great-grandmother knew some German, but I don't think she ever used it around my grandma. My grandma was once musing about how she could "imagine" her grandparents swearing in their own languages in a heated argument with each other, and that word choice makes me think it's not something she ever witnessed personally 😛 On the other side of my family there are a bunch who immigrated here from Ireland around the same time (1850s), but I'm guessing they were bilingual if they spoke Irish at all when they came here, so there were no further generations in Australia who knew Irish.