“This is the coolest thing that’s happened in a really long time. Welcome to family.”
Comments shared with Rudy Owens by his distant cousin shortly after meeting his Finnish family in Finland in September 2023
By Rudy Owens, MA, MPH
(Editor’s note: Names of my living Finnish relatives are abbreviated intentionally, using this format: Me…, He…, Ki…, etc.)
For years I have repeated a phrase that speaks an eternal truth known to many cultures, globally.
In the English language that wisdom is: “Blood is thicker than water.” In Finnish, they say, “Veri on vettä sakeampaa.” Other languages also explore this idea about the primacy of kinship, such as Mandarin. The Chinese expression translates to: “Family relationships are stronger than any others.”
It is an expression many of us know, almost by instinct.
Its meaning is universal. It reflects how we have evolved, through evolution and our common, shared history, grounded in our closest relations. It also defines how humans have engaged and continue to relate to those closest to them, especially their biological family and blood kin.
For me, that truth became even more clear following my incredible 11-day trip in September 2023 to Finland, one of my ancestral home countries. In this Nordic nation, six years a row voted the world’s happiest country, I had this truth reaffirmed in unforgettable ways. I shared these life-affirming moments with the people I met and with whom we collectively share relatives dating back more than two centuries.
They are and always will be my “family.” They are and always will be my kin.
Ultimately, biological family connects all of us, no matter our age, race, country, or culture.
Family is universal. We all have family—biological family. It’s the common glue that binds us to others.
The acclaimed writer Alex Haley, author of Roots: The Saga of an American Family, succinctly described our collective humanity after the publication of his globally beloved family history of formally enslaved west Africans brought to America. “We are first many millions of families sharing this earth,” said Haley. “After the miracle of life itself, the greatest human common denominator is families.”
Adoption secrecy hides my Finnish family story
As an adventure of discovery and learning, my trip to Finland in September 2023 exceeded my wildest expectations. In less than two weeks I drove more than 2,000 kilometers and met and befriended my distant Finnish relatives. I had not known they existed for certain less than a month earlier.
We created bonds, and they felt sturdy. I instantly felt I was standing on a solid foundation that had been missing for decades, to an ancestral land and a wider kin network. This footing was as solid as the granite rocks that cover the Finnish landscape.
More than six weeks after my wonderful meetings with my kin relatives in Finland, I am still struggling for words to describe the undeniable reality that the trip proved to me about blood kinship and life.
Among the most certain and provable facts before me are photos, showing my resemblance to my relatives, removed now by three generations.
The evidence that I am related to my Finnish kin is visible to anyone looking at our photos. The strongest similarity is my uncanny facial and even body similarities to a younger male distant cousin, who I did not meet. One of my other distant cousins, who is his sister, tells me, “The resemblance is uncanny.” In fact all the family members who have met me agree on this visual reality they can confirm with their eyes.
The other fact I can grasp with a firm grip is the shared joy we all felt by simply connecting. It felt organic and without effort.
But how should one describe soul-felt joy meeting one’s blood kin one has never met in more than a half-century? How should a person explain how he is greeted warmly as family, with a new nickname “Uncle Rudy” (“Rudy-setä” in Finnish) among the youngest newfound relatives?
More importantly, how do you tell people like disinterested media, public health officials, and lawmakers about this feeling, particularly when such kin ties have been denied to you by state law and the power of a state and its public health bureaucracy for decades?
Despite all of the positive experiences I can share about connecting with my kin, they don’t change that I am still denied the legal right to have these blood and family relations and knowledge of my identity and—in my case—Finnish ancestry by the full force of Michigan state law.
My transformative experience in September 2023 felt very Finnish. My new Finnish family relations are actually in flagrant violation of the still-standing law. By law I was never, ever, supposed to have these filial connections.
That law and the large state agency that strictly enforces it stand in opposition to the truth and meaning of what I experienced. It’s as if my life and my family’s story never existed and must remain silenced to support this system that hides people’s basic truth of who they are and from where they come. The system continues to deny adoptees records of their birth. This also means basic human rights are denied to tens of thousands of those separated by adoption in Michigan.
As I share my improbable story of family separation and the power of blood kinship to temporarily defeat that system with just one small victory, I know my words likely may not lead to lasting legal change. But my Finnish spirit compels me to try. I know impossible things can happen, as my Finland trip proved to me again.
Forever Finnish by blood and character
Technically I am a quarter Finnish—in the most literal sense and blood relations.
My ancestors are Finnish, Welsh, English, and still largely unknown on my paternal side. I learned this after two and a half decades of being denied this knowledge only because I was born and relinquished for adoption in Detroit in 1965. My book, published in 2018, provides this larger story.
My birth mother had a mostly Welsh-American father (family name Owens) and a 100 percent ethnically Finnish mother (family name Nelson). My maternal grandmother was one of two daughters born in Michigan to Finnish immigrants to the Upper Peninsula.
Tens of thousands of Finns emigrated from their homeland to this region on the Great Lakes during the decades of emigration from then-Russian controlled Finland, from the 1880s to the early 1900s. A large group also settled in Ontario, Canada, around Thunder Bay. Up to 80 percent of all Finns who left Finland during the era of mass outward emigration to the United States moved to Minnesota and Michigan, to mostly work in the extractive and physically demanding timber and mining industries, like my great grandfather did in Michigan.
He had what appears to have been a hard-scrabble life, dying at age 57, having worked for mining and resource companies that shipped those raw materials. I have already outlived him. My longer life makes his life seem melancholic and tragic.
A disproportionate number of those Finnish emigres—more than 30 percent according to one source I read—like my great grandmother and great grandfather, came from the Finnish state of South Ostrobothnia. It lies next to the west coast of central Finland, inland from the Baltic Sea in the center of the country.
The closest and largest urban area is the port city of Vaasa, a port many used to leave the country.
Many fled persecution by the occupying Russian Empire, until independence was achieved in 1917 during World War I, when the Russian Empire collapsed. At least one of my male Finnish ancestors had been forced to serve the Russian imperial army in the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–1878. Immigration from Finland to North America subsided once independence was achieved and a violent revolution in 1918 resolved that crushed the communist faction in Finland. My Finnish relatives also fought in that conflict, for the victorious Whites over the communist Reds.
Others who left were likely seeking a better life from a harsh agricultural existence in this still largely rural, farming area. I was able to understand the mass emigration more viscerally when I went there. Only a generation before the great migration by Finns to the United States, nearly one in 10 Finns died between 1866 and 1868 in what’s called today the Great Famine, due to unexpected cold weather that severely disrupted harvests.
My Finnish ancestors would have endured that famine that haunted farming communities like those in South Ostrobothnia. Epigenetics as a field tells us that the trauma from population health stresses are also passed down the successive generations, including my kin. Like it or note, we inherit these calamitous events into our bodies and our health outcomes.
According to historian Mari Niemi, in her 1998 article on Finnish emigration from this area, seven in 10 of these immigrants came from farms. (See Niemi’s article, “Hunger or Yearning for Freedom? Migration from South Ostrobothnia to North America,” starting on p. 59.) This is likely the story behind my relatives’ story leaving farming villages.
My family, according to the family history records I have that were created by my maternal grandmother’s sister, go as far back as 1770. The first entry begins with the marriage of Michel Törn and Magdalena Anders. Many Finns in this regions share Swedish ancestry, and my family likely reflects these intermingled ethnic relations. Today, Swedish remains an official language of Finland. Michel was born in Alahärmä. Magdalena’s birthplace is not listed, and family records show their marriage at a town called Nykarbyssa, which is called Nykarleby in Finnish, a smaller town on the coast, north of Vaasa.
The next generations of Törns continued to live in small villages of Alahärmä and another small village, about 25 kilometers to the east, called Kortesjärvi. My great-grandmother was born here, along with her two sisters. Intermingling and with the Törns in my family tree are the marriages with other families named Kosonen, Asumaa, Kangas, Back/Beck, Kemppainen, Kangas, Hietala, and Unkuri—a connection that helped me find my kin. (See this wonderful genealogy resource on Finnish family names and origins.)
These are only some of family bloodlines that make up who I am today, genetically and as a descendant of my relatives. I was never just a blank slate, who could be scrubbed clean of past and family ties, which is what happened to me when I was surrendered for adoption in the mid-1960s at one of the nation’s largest adoption mills, Crittenton General Hospital of Detroit.
What is clear is that my relatives from the 1700s through the start of the 1900s experienced lives tied to subsistence agriculture, in a place that was no stranger to crop failures and catastrophic famine.
In 1997 and 1998, as I was changing jobs, I planned a trip to Finland, hoping to visit Vaasa and specifically to see the ancestral villages of my ancestors. That never happened. Life, limited resources, and family challenges forced me to delay this journey. That changed in 2023.
This year my life and work finally had stability after three years of almost nonstop work dealing with historic wildfires in Oregon and the pandemic, when I worked with almost no time off and for often 12 or more hours a day.
In 2023, health issues also severely worsened for a birth family member and remained very bad for an adoptive family member. I faced a choice of waiting for inevitable outcomes, or take a trip and trust fortuna. Fate tugged me to go, and I listened.
An odyssey driven by ‘sisu’ begins on Kalevala Day 2023:
On February 28, 2023, several Finnish Twitter accounts I follow announced the arrival of Kalevala Day, the national holiday in Finland that celebrates Finland’s famous national epic called the Kalevala.
The folk myth, collected and first published in 1835 by a doctor and folklorist Elias Lönnrot, later became the basis of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth mythology. Tolkien borrowed many key story elements to his mythical world and even the Finnish language was turned into his imaginary elvish tongue.
That day I again contemplated my Finnish roots. It felt different this time. I began sharing how many adoptees’ family roots remain severed by the cruelty of the nation’s broken adoption system.
I started reading the famous Kalevala epic, and I was quickly seduced by Finnish mythology. I wrote an essay on what it means to be Finnish, at least a quarter Finnish, and how my understanding of “sisu” made me ask myself if my lifelong trait of stubbornness had a “genetic” characteristic. Or was this a result of life experience from having to fight adoption bureaucracies for the most important information about one’s human identity, that all non-adoptees get by law.
“Sisu” is derived from the word “sisus,” which translates to “interior,” or inside of a thing or a being. It has been described as stubborn resolve and the Finns’ individual and national strength and ability “to keep going no matter what.” It is a product of an arctic and cold environment, historic famines, foreign occupation by the Swedish and then Russian empires, and then horrific conflicts during World War II. During that global conflagration, Finland fought three separate wars: two against the USSR and the final against their one-time ally, Nazi Germany in order to make lasting peace with the Soviets but at great cost of losing about a tenth of its pre-war territory.
For me, sisu has always felt like a bodily embodiment of mental toughness. One description I found compared it the ability to get through granite.
Sisu, as a life force, also mirrored my own organic approach I developed to confront life’s hardest challenges with a mindset to “never, ever, ever, ever give up.” My early failures in life taught me to embrace this attitude as I became an adult.
Today, this thinking resonates with everything I do in life and the things that have meant the most to me in helping me a better person. It fit because it was who I was. The lessons I learned through my hardest times, including the inherent wrongs surrounding my treatment as an adoptee by the country’s heavily promoted adoption culture and the larger legal and public health systems that prop it up, also have led to things that I cherish the most now.
In March 2023, I wrote: “I have often wondered if my Finnish genetic heritage played a role in my fight for my birth records that lasted nearly three decades with the state of Michigan and the discriminatory public health agency there that manages all adoptees’ vital records… . I take pride that the state did everything it could to defeat me, to deny me my humanity and my ancestry, and in the end, my ancestry prevailed over a broken system.”
It was my resolve to find my identify as a Finnish-American adoptee—my inner sisu—that my Finnish relatives I met in Finland also saw in my story before we met in person. Before I had arrived, one of my relatives had watched a video of a podcast I did in May 2023 about my advocacy and story and left the comment: “I loved to listen to this story. Welcome to Finland, Rudy.”
I believe they recognized something in me and my search my identity, as an adoptee severed from his clan and family, that had to be Finnish.
My quest had a Finnish and improbable, fanatical quality, which might be found in one of the characters of the Kalevala, probably the tragic anti-hero and orphan Kullervo. (It was no accident that during my first run in Helsinki the morning after I arrived, I accidentally stumbled on a famous statue of Kullervo holding his sword, with a dog by his feet.)
This made my eventual welcoming to the Finnish family circle all the more satisfying. It was almost as if I had completed a rite of passage that required no further proof than finding them all and flying halfway around the world to meet them. Only someone authentically Finnish would hurl themselves into such a mythological quest, like Kullervo, but in my case without the tragic outcomes. My mythmaking was to be a joyous one.
Indeed, after I returned, one my Finnish relatives shared in his Facebook post about our family meeting one of the nicest compliments about me I can ever recall: “Quite a pattern and this guy has 100% blood and guts in his veins. Rudy = the man with Finnish Sisu, respect!!” That is a startling compliment coming from someone born in Finland!
Today, now that I know first-hand about Finland and its chart-topping successes in health, education, income equality, gender equity, and basic happiness, I could not be prouder to be a Finnish-American and proud son of Suomi. Despite foreign conquest, famines, civil war and eventual independence, and the violent invasion by vastly more powerful Soviet Union during World War II, Finland forged a path defined by suffering, setbacks, sisu, and most importantly policies that care for all.
This is an accidental gift of ethnic birthright from past Finnish immigrants to the United States.
Your mission: find your kin in three months:
All good adventures begin with the moment of decision—the crossing of one’s own Rubicon. The bolder the action, the more successful the outcomes.
The first time I publicly shared I had started my research project was my Tweet on April 6, 2023: “And my new journey into my ancestral past has begun. Where it ends now, I know not. Once the ship leaves its harbor of safety for parts unknown, the mind, heart, and soul breath in the fresh sea air that only is found by discovery. #Finland”
I am certain fate played a large role in my recent game-changing trip to Finland. I could feel its tentacles pulling me along as my planning took shape.
I chose the first two weeks of September to do a proper holiday in Finland/Suomi. It is a nice time for travel and is “shoulder” season in northern countries. I knew this by lived experience, having lived more than six years in Alaska. Northerners everywhere treasure this time.
In early June 2023 I booked my tickets for leaving Aug. 30, 2023 and returning home Sept.15, 2023. I would include a short visit to Stockholm for a day and two days to see an old friend in Copenhagen. I did both, and loved both cities, but my trip ultimately focused on my “journey home” to an ancestral home country, Finland.
I then gave myself three months to pull off a possibly impossible task: find my unknown relatives in Finland.
I had little to work with, except old family genealogy sources. Back in 1989, in the weeks just after I found my biological maternal family, I found a gold mine of family records.
When I first met my birth mother in 1989, she shared the family ethnic history with me, and she even showed me a family tree made by her aunt—sister of my biological grandmother. I was amazed by the details dating back to the late 1700s, when Finland was still under control of the Swedish Empire. Until that point, adoption secrecy laws had successfully hidden my family genealogy. She also showed me a detailed record of all relatives compiled in a 16-page family history showing relatives by name, birth, death, relationships, marriages, parents, and children.
That family history omitted my name. I did not exist.
I had been legally erased by the U.S. and Michigan state adoption system within days of my birth, both legally and by the willingness of my biological family to allow me to be taken away. My birth family went along with disappearance—as did millions of other families in the years after World War II. My family historian either was never informed I was born by her sister, or she intentionally deleted me from ever being born in the family tree.
All of that changed in 1989 when I “reappeared” and my birth mother, my birth grand-parents, my birth cousin, and my birth uncle had to deal with the “relinquished son.” It wasn’t until the summer of 2023, when planned my trip, that I spoke to some of my other Finnish-American family members for the first time. These are the kin who are listed in the family tree.
My birth mother’s Finnish-American cousins had learned about me, but never contacted me on their own over more than 34 years since I “just appeared” in 1989.
Because I knew instinctively the importance of these family records, I convinced my birth mother to make me copies. She mailed them to me in May 1989, including the family tree that sprawls on a large sheet of canvas paper for several feet. I kept duplicate copies of the tree in a tube, mostly out of sight for years at a time.
With my mind settled for trying to meet my distal kin in Finland, I pulled my Finnish family’s history documents out of storage. I tacked a copy of the family tree, now laminated, next to my computer desk to keep my mind focused on my goal. It is still there.
I joined FamilySearch.com. My birth cousin had filled in some information based on our shared records, and some others had added names. I started looking for clues about possible relatives living in Finland. That online system, all based on imperfect information shared by users, did not help me find relatives that might be alive and living in Finland today. The time gap was significant.
So I turned back to the meticulously drafted family tree. I learned it had errors because of note taking and faulty oral histories from family members in both countries. It also had not been updated since the last entries in the 1970s.
That meant the last known relatives could have died or changed names through marriage because of this gap of nearly 50 years. I used a very helpful Finnish genealogical website called Tuomas Salste, containing over 24,014 family names found in Finland, to find where some family names, like Törn, a Swedish name, and where descendants may be living today. The website shows living persons by family name and regions. That method failed, but it revealed the family name Törn was rare.
I turned to several avenues to chase down family history—my living relatives and sources I could contact in Finland.
I struck up a relationship with one of my birth mom’s cousins. We had decades of catching up to do. She shared our shared Finnish-American family photos about life in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for our ancestors. She told me family saunas as a Finnish cultural tradition were alive and well through the late 1940s. I also learned that her grandmother, my great grandmother, Hilma, had visited Finland before World War II in the 1930s with her oldest child John, son of her first husband. (The first husband died tragically and she remarried another Finnish immigrant, my great grandfather, Isaac.).
Thanks to Satu, the impossible happens:
I also contacted Suomen Sukututkimusseura, the Genealogical Society of Finland, in early June 2023. One of their most active members on its Facebook page suggested I could hire a professional genealogist. I did not have time and did not think that would work well.
I then turned to Google, using family names in my family’s genealogy documents and geographic locations where my family likely could be. I wrote to strangers by email. My earnestness struck a chord of sympathy with the Finnish strangers I contacted.
One wrong hit, a lawyer in Helsinki I emailed on May 31, 2023, told me his family was south of where my some of my family came from and that he knew there were others with the same family name closer to my family villages in South Ostrobothnia. “I wish you success in your search and a nice trip to Finland some day,” the lawyer cheerily added.
Another person with a hyphenated family name, the same as the lawyer I contacted and a family name in my family tree, popped up late at night during my searching. I wrote her a long note on from June 19, 2023, outlining my family history and explaining I hoped to find my kin when I visited in Finland in September. Again, my complicated family tale struck a note of sympathy with this Finnish stranger, Satu. I added a friendly plea for help: “It appears you have married an … .? You’re welcome to share this with your partner. I know this is a low-probability chance of a connection, but it’s worth a try.”
Something clicked. Perhaps by fate, this complete stranger, a nursing professor, changed everything, including the trajectory in my life.
Satu generously offered to contact the branch of her husband’s family. A couple of weeks went by. Satu had few updates to share, and we stayed in touch by email. I sent her all the family information I had, and that must have assured her I was a man on a mission to find his Finnish relatives. Perhaps my persistence resonated as something Finnish too.
In late July, I heard back from Satu she had found a person with the family name of an ancestor who “still lives quite near the area of Kortesjärvi and Kurikka.” She said she sent my message to her friend if she could contact a possible relative of mine. It was summer, and many people would not be checking messages due to the long holidays Finns enjoy.
Using Facebook, Satu reached out to a couple of my distant relatives. One thought it was a prank and deleted the message. My other distant cousin, Ki…, opened the note. He read it only by chance, as he seldom ever opened Facebook messages from strangers. I later learned he read the message with curiosity and amazement about this relative from the United States—a guy from Portland, Oregon, named Rudy Owens. Ultimately, the details in the family tree convinced him I was not a scammer, but a family member.
As I started my work day on August 8, 2023, I practically spilled my big cup of Earl Grey tea on my keyboard.
I first read a happy note by email from Satu: “I have wonderful news for you! I have found another person from the … family via social media. … He lives in Seinäjoki, which is a rather small city about 80 kms from Vaasa. I sent him your email address. He wrote me that he would be very happy to meet you when you come to Finland! I’m so glad that my detective work paid off!”
I was elated. I had found my family, with three weeks before my departure. The trip was coming together, and everything was clicking in ways that made me feel again that fate had intervened generously.
I then got an email from Ki… the same day: “You are now having contact to …. relatives in Finland. … Satu sent me a message via Facebook and got full hit!” He shared names of our relatives, place names where family relatives were buried, some family history about relatives who fought on the side of the Whites during the Finnish Civil War, and his wish to help with family reunions when I came in September.
Later that day I wrote to eight relatives introducing myself and letting them know my plans for visiting Finland. A few wrote back. In follow-up emails shortly after to Ki… I shared more information about my past as an adoptee, my search for my kin and family ancestry, and why I had a strong interest in finding my family roots in Finland.
“Usually when I come up with such ideas, I like to follow them, because that is why life is a wonderful thing,” I wrote to him. “Things happen for a reason, and one should follow the ‘noise’ one hears.” I also explained my personal connection to “sisu” and my lifelong curiosity of “if my stubbornness has a ‘genetic’ characteristic or if it’s just a result of life experience.”
On August 14, 2023, I heard from my distant aunt, Me…. Her grandmother and my great grandmother were cousins. She gave me a nice family history and noted how I resembled two of her adult children: “I find same features on my sons’ and your faces.” Later I learned that others in the family, including two daughters, said the same thing, completely separate from each other. When I compared a photo to the youngest son in the family with myself, and shared it with friends, everyone I sent them to were mostly stunned; some swore we could be brothers. All my friends mostly shared that the power of genetic similarities were both astonishing and cool.
As we learned from doing research, mostly by Me…, the two cousins were very close. They kept up an active correspondence during the 1930s, all in Finnish, during the harsh war years of the 1940s, and beyond. Me… did not need much more convincing about who I was, as I closely resembled her two sons—my distant cousins. In her first message to me, Me… wrote, “It would be really nice to meet you when you come to our far-away country! Could that be possible? There may be a lot of us waiting for you.”
These simple words felt seismic.
They said everything. I think it was truly the first time ever over decades of navigating the cruelties and complexities of the U.S. adoption system that my presence in other’s lives felt truly acknowledged and also as a positive thing.
Without having met me, they welcomed me, as kin and family. They had seen my photographs, they had read the family history I sent them, and they could see the family tree, tracing out bloodlines to the marriage of Michel Törn and Magdalena Anders—our common ancestors.
The ground-changing August 2023 developments had made very clear to me that my instincts to do the trip were perfectly tuned.
Just before leaving, on August 20, 2023, I published an essay on my website on biological family relations and kinship, noting: “None of this is a surprise, and yet it is profoundly visceral. It is hard to describe this to others… . After my Finnish relatives and I connected, I have been sharing regularly a line on social media that I have been sharing for years: ‘Blood is thicker than water.’ I have never, ever doubted this truth. My trip, literally ‘going home’ to the old ancestral villages of Finland, is nothing more than proof of this knowledge of what it means to be connected and to be human.”
‘Returning home’ to the ancestral villages:
During the first six days of my travels in Finland, my relatives and I made our final arrangements to have two different visits. Ki… provided started a WhatsApp list we used to coordinate our big gathering so different family members could meet on a Saturday in the center of the country.
Instead of driving my rental car clockwise around the lower half of the Nordic country, I scrambled all my plans and changed directions. I dropped plans to visit more northern destinations like Oulu and Suomussalmi. Instead, I drove starting counter-clockwise in the eastern regions of Karelia and then finished my Finnish holiday with the family events in the regions of South Ostrobothnia and Pirkanmaa.
My first “family meeting” would be with my distant aunt and her husband, in the lovely small South Ostrobothnian city called Kurikka. It’s about an hour’s drive from Vaasa, located in mostly farming country mixed with many small towns. We scheduled that for September 7, 2023, and timing allowed me to arrive the evening earlier.
My other and bigger family event was set for September 9, 2023 in Finland’s third largest city, Tampere, a beautiful urban center that sits nestled between two beautiful lakes, Näsijärvi and Pyhäjärvi, and is about equal distance inland from the other two large metro areas, greater Helsinki and greater Turku.
My relatives, coming from the north and Helsinki, could all meet here, and three of my distant cousins—Jo…, An…, and He…—lived there, making it an ideal gathering place. The family lunch would include another third cousin, Ki…, his aunt/my distant great aunt, Pi…, and another distant aunt, Si… and her husband, came from homes in Helsinki and Seinäjoki.
On day seven of my trip, September 6, 2023, I drove 500 kilometers, east to west from the beautiful national park, Koli, near the Russian border, to Kurikka. It is cozy city is about 75 kilometers inland from the Baltic Sea. I was treated to blue lakes and forests, where I wished I could explore. I took an hour break in the lovely lakeside city of Kuopio and at a few other lakes.
Using Google maps, I arrived at around 6 p.m. at the home of Me…, one of my distant relatives from the Törns. Her and her husband’s residence sat at the end of a cul de sac, next to a forest. They had a comfortable single-story home by the pine woods. Two Norwegian elkhounds that lived outdoors greeted me with friendly whines. It felt nice to arrive at someone’s home in another country.
We had spoken once by video chat, and they had let me know I was very welcome to be their guest. I felt before I came that I was accepted as family, even though we had not met in person. My physical resemblance to her two sons likely proved what we had documented by the family records—we were blood relatives.
Me… had retired from teaching. Her husband had worked as an anesthesia nurse for more than 30 years. He now served as a union trustee at hospital in a neighboring city, on behalf of the hospital’s diverse medical personnel. I learned right away he loved to hunt from the pictures on the wall.
In a letter I shared with a friend after my stay, I wrote: “They are very Finnish: outdoorsy, hardy people. Their freezer is filled with berries and meat and other foods they gather. They fed me moose soup.” It was delicious soup, too. It felt very Alaskan to me, and I realized how important it was for many Finns to be close to nature.
They made me feel right at home. We immediately set out on a walk to downtown Kurikka, delightful small city with about 20,000. We all shared a love of walking and being outdoors. They were fast walkers too. I enjoyed the community. For me it served as an example of Finnish planning to create a complete, livable community. My journal entry noted: “I like the towns here. They are very livable and not ‘dumps.’ They are created to nurture people.”
They knew many people and shared greetings. They showed off the sports fields, exercise stairs by the river, the downtown, the sculpture of the city’s great distance cross country skier and Olympic medalist Juha Mieto (who won a silver medal at Lake Place—a ski tip behind), and the old museum. At the large cemetery by Kurikka’s stately, old Lutheran church—Kurkikan kirkko—I saw the grave of Me…’s grandmother. The two had a close bond.
Me… told me who she used to share a room with her grandmother, Lempi, as a child. She was the cousin of my Finnish great grandmother, Hilma, who had emigrated to the United States in 1903.
Just before I had arrived, Me… had been digging in her records that included correspondences, some nearly 90 years old, and photographs sent by my great grandma and her first son, John, from her first marriage. The two regularly corresponded, in Finnish, with their Finnish relatives back in Finland, in Kortesjärvi. They also travelled back to Finland, including a trip in 1936, during the Great Depression.
She translated a letter from Hilma to Lempi, when Finland was at war with the USSR in 1940. She talked about her worries that Finland had not received enough sympathy in the United States. I don’t know how letters would have been sent across the Atlantic during wartime with Germany against the Allies. I realized how Finnish my great grandmother was after decades in the United States seeing her handwriting written in Finnish, like all of letters laid out before me. In one letter from winter 1940, Me… translated how Hilma was managing boarders. She may have run a guest house or managed some rental property. She talked about studying the Constitution to become a U.S. citizen. It was the first time I learned that my great grandmother was not even a U.S. citizen after nearly four decades in the United States. I then realized how she felt linguistically and culturally Finnish.
I also saw a stack of black and white and a few color photographs. I saw shots of my birth mother and my birth uncle as children, my birth mother’s cousins as children, and other relatives of my extended Finnish American family, including of weddings and other major family moments. One of the photos showed Hilma and her first son, John, on a ship in the harbor of the coastal city Turku from 1936. Another showed Hilma in the yard of my birth grandparents’ home in Detroit. It was taken around the time of my birth.
I mostly felt awe. Me… and I could see just how close the two cousins were, and by default how our U.S. and Finnish families shared a common bond. That bond had been severed by time and perhaps by the death of Hilma and Lempi, who both died in 1969.
The next morning, on September 7, 2023, Me…, Ja…, and I drove about an hour and a half north of Kurikka to Alahärmä and Kortesjärvi, passing through the farming area of South Ostrobothnia. On my drive there, I felt a profoundly personal connection to my Finnish-American’ family’s home villages and also their peasant farming roots.
“It’s hard to describe the joy I felt,” I wrote in an blog post after coming home. “The feeling was one of utter and total joy.”
In a video I made in the car just before I arrived at Alahärmä, I could not contain my giddiness on the eve of arriving at places where my kin were born and died. “This is coming home,” I shared, with a silly grin. “This is the real deal.”
My journal entry that day described the flat, farm country surrounding the small community. “It must have been painfully dull to the minds of those who lived and died here for hundreds of years. … Today there are some apartments and homes, a few stores, and the historic 1903 church. There are two church cemeteries where Törns are buried. There’s a large monument to the dead from WWII. It had fresh flowers like all of the monuments to the dead I’ve seen.” My Alahärmä journal entry also referenced my ancestors who “had been born, grew up, got sick, had kids, lived, laughed, suffered, endured hardship (including the Great Famine of 1866-68 that killed one in every 10 Finns), occupation and brutality of Cossack soldiers, conscription in the Swedish and Russian armies, and worse.”
With Me… and her husband Ja…, we explored the cemeteries. We had been told there would be Törns buried here. I only found a single headstone of my family’s namesake. We also found headstones of some family relatives of Me…’s, with the family name Suomela.
After an hour and then a lunch break, we drove about 25 kilometers to the east, to Kortesjärvi, which also had two cemeteries, where we looked for family names. The red, wooden church dates to 1794. The village was home to our relatives as late as the 1940s. I managed to find one headstone of a likely Törn relative. It felt comforting to see the name carved in granite, of a clan that I belonged to. It made me feel connected to a place and to a long line of kin. Before we finished our visits to the final resting place of our shared village ancestors, I found a stone to take back home—a small memento from the old world to occasionally hold in my hand back in my home in the new world.
We then split up, with Me… and her husband driving back to Kurikka to prepare for a trip to Finnish Lapland the next day and me visiting the coastal city of Vaasa. I came back later in the evening. Me… gave me the collection she had found of letters and photos sent by our U.S. relatives to our Finnish relatives, which felt like family treasures.
That night, I wrote a note to a fellow Michigan-born adoptee, who also had visited one of his home countries, Sweden, and had also visited his relatives’ ancestral village there, like I did in Finland. “So the connection with my mom and Finland is profoundly real. I never knew this. … We are family, and we get along well. … It’s all very profound. If ever I heard a siren singing, this was the time. It was good to crash my ship into Finland.”
A family affair in Tampere:
I spent September 8, 2023 visiting the beautiful coastal cities Kaskinen, Kristenstad, and Rauma. I fell in loved the country’s Baltic coastline and the older, wooden buildings found in these cities. The Swedish cultural footprint felt pronounced in the architecture, and the region maintains close relations with neighboring regions just across the seas in Sweden.
I left early on September 9, 2023 to drive about two hours inland to the former industrial center and now sleek and modern city of Tampere.
Three of my distant cousins call it home. The youngest of the three would miss the event. Two of them, Jo… and An… and each of their two daughters and An…’s husband, commuted locally to our meeting place, Tempella Restaurant, in the city’s center. It was located in the old industrial center, which reminded me old home city of St. Louis and its many brick warehouses and factories.
The city center is covered with large and stately brick buildings that once housed textile mills and factories, next to the Tammerkoski Falls, where waters from Lake Näsijärvi pour down the chasm to Lake Pyhäjärvi. The area is now upscale and converted to offices and other businesses. My other relatives—my distant cousin Ki…, his daughter, and his aunt/my distant great aunt, Pi…—travelled in from two hours away. My other distant aunt, Si… and her husband, drove up from the Helsinki area. We had three generations of distant kin, from two continents, assembled on a sunny, beautiful, late summer day.
After parking my rental car deep in an underground parking lot beneath the city center, I made my way up to the busy downtown city center. The main thoroughfare, Hämeenkatu, was crammed with people and busy with trams and foot traffic (I love how the cities are designed). From there it was a short walk to scenic paths by the famous channel called Tammerkoski Falls to the meeting place at Tampella.
At 11 a.m., as the restaurant opened, we gathered, perhaps a bit awkwardly at first, but all sharing smiles.
It was the biggest gathering of biologically related relatives I ever had in my entire life. All of them had come because they wanted to connect with their visiting relative from the United States that none knew existed less than a month earlier. I also think we all came together because it was the first time that kin and families on other side of the Atlantic had connected in person since my great grandmother and her first and oldest son had traveled to Finland in the 1930s.
I knew all of them had the rough outline of my story. Prior to flying to Finland, I made some introductory connections with my distant cousins, and we had already friended each other on LinkedIn and Facebook in August 2023. Ki… and I also had met once by videochat before I left. They all knew I was adopted and separated from my biological family for nearly a quarter century and had found my kin and ancestry. I believe this made our meeting more meaningful.
Five of the youngest ones who gathered, including the daughter of my distant cousin, Ki…, welcomed me with smiles. I felt a warm connection to my young “nieces,” as their now “Uncle Rudy.” Nearly all of “big kids,” the parents and older folks, spoke excellent or very good English. I apologized for not having tried to learn their native Finnish language—a language my Finnish American relatives used in the United States well into the 1950s.
I mostly remember smiling a lot and enjoying the unhurried lunch and conversations. Everyone appeared to be a pleasantly surprised by this amazing coincidence and unexpected turn of fate and fortune that a long lost American relative had found his long-lost Finnish relatives, against the odds.
After we finished lunch, I pulled out my laptop and shared photos of my biological and adoptive families I had assembled in a PowerPoint slideshow. An… and Jo… quickly noted a striking similarity between one of their two brothers and my biological uncle, the twin brother of my birth mom. No one displayed any offense or showed any awkward strangeness as I talked about my adoption history and how and why I set out to find my past and my biological kin. I felt no judgments or fielded any question that I have often had to navigate, such as if I was “betraying” my adoptive family by seeking out my blood relatives.
This was the first time I can remember feeling completely and fully accepted for who I was, and at the same time welcome without reservation. I had been welcomed by some of my biological family in the United States before, but not like this.
Before we left the restaurant, Ki… shared gifts. He gave me a towel (perfect for sauna!) and thermos with the word “sisu” emblazoned on both in traditional characters. It was his nod to me that I had earned his respect for demonstrating the Finnish spirit. I almost cried. That night, I wrote to my friend: “They see that in me. I think it’s one reason they embrace me. They know I’m Finnish like them.”
With everyone’s happy cooperation and help from Tampella’s food servers, we arranged group selfies. I also had the group take pictures of me and my cousins inside the restaurants. The smiles I see looking at the portraits now are full of surprise, fun, joy, and bemusement all at once. I especially liked a photo taken of me with distant cousins Jo… and An…—all of us with the same grin and the family’s red hair showing up distinctly sitting side by side.
After lunch we all walked along the paths by the old factories. An…’s husband proved to be an outstanding tour guide, providing me colorful stories of the bloody 1918 Revolution and industrial capitalism that made Tampere one of a kind for Finnish cities. Following fierce fighting, the victorious Whites, led by Commander-in-Chief Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, crushed the communist Reds and then massacred hundreds in purges that followed in 1918. It was the bloodiest battle of the conflict and ensured Finland’s future independence from the newly created USSR next door.
The city’s violent past seemed hard to imagine with all the families, children, runners, bikers, skateboarders, and people of all ages enjoying the day on the greenways and parks next to the Tammerkoski channel. As we walked from park to park, I was amazed at how well the Finns had created spaces where kids naturally come together to play. Parenting seemed relaxed. My relatives told me they trusted their community, their fellow residents, and their kids and did not need to constantly monitor their kids’ every movement. It felt very empowering. I felt proud to be connected to Finland.
Our final destination, where we posed for group photos, was a monument on a prominent hill, the Kurun haaksirikon muistomerkki, honoring a ferry boat tragedy. It overlooks Lake Näsijärvi and made for a fitting place to capture the family outing with pictures to share with others who could not come.
We made our way back to Tammerkoski and soon began to say our farewells. Ki… and I were the last to say goodbye, after sharing beers at a beautiful outdoor beer garden. The pleasant setting in this charming city planted the seeds for a future trip I was already devising quietly in my head. He let me know soon after I returned home I would be welcome to visit him and his girlfriend in the future. That invitation felt like it came from the heart.
The next day, after I had returned to Helsinki for my final night in Finland, I found three short videos from the one distant cousin in Tampere, He…, who could not make our family meal. They introduced themself with a warm smile. I saw some similarities in our lips, high cheekbones, and hair color. We later connected by video chat when I got home and have stayed in touch since. Like their sisters and their mother, they remarked how much I looked like their two brothers I didn’t meet.
Since coming home, with everyone’s lives falling back to their normal routines, I continue to stay in touch with some of my newly found relatives. It has been nice to see photos of the newly fallen snow in Tampere and Kurikka from my kin in early November 2023. I’ve shared a few pictures of Portland. I hope we maintain these ties. They may not know it yet, but I plan to take them up on another trip, perhaps in the winter, to see Finland when it is covered in white, to cross country ski. That would be pure joy.
The triumph of sisu:
As I continue to share the story of my Finland journey and my “pilgrimage” to the village homes of my ancestors, I am left with important truths and some wisdom.
I can point to outcomes that could only be learned about life by chasing my truth. Truths often are not what we expect, and often feel like great jokes.
In late October, I shared this wisdom with my distant Finnish cousins: “I think I really found myself through adversity and finally knowing my origins. It took a while. I do not think this was an accident. Life is filled with odd events and wonder. I have learned that challenges can end in ways we can never predict. I count my blessings often for life.”
The most important truth I found confirmed for me the importance of family and knowledge of one’s identity. My Finnish roots were never severed because a national system called adoption that removed me from my family.
The inequitable adoption secrecy laws in my birth state Michigan and decades of lies and deceptive efforts by my adoption agency and its successors, the state’s vital records agency, and the much broader national culture prioritizing family separation by our national adoption system falsely claimed I could be born anew by being placed with a family with no biological relationship to me.
My trip, my newly-discovered Finnish family connections, and my perseverance through Finnish sisu, tore down these walls. They are scattered in rubble. Sisu prevailed, defiantly. It was not coincidence.
My connection to one of my familial homelands by blood kinship—my core Finnishness—was imprinted genetically in my body, my face, my hair.
The facts of the genetic closeness I have in photos of my former and distal kin and family relatives documents this with absolute certainty. For those of us who never saw our blood kin for decades and persevered to find their biological relatives, this truth feels grounding in the most satisfying ways.
Unfortunately I had to overcome decades of secrecy and secretive adoption laws to know my family history.
As of November 2023, those laws remain on the books today, including in my birth state of Michigan. Five years after publishing my book highlighting this injustice to tens of thousands of adoptees in Michigan, who may never be able to know their family roots and true identity, nothing has changed there—yet.
It still feels like I am charging windmills. Regardless, my understanding of what it means to be alive and fully human could not be clearer.
That reality is this. Blood is thicker than water. My story is living proof, and the adoption system’s house of cards denying this fact needs to fall.
Additional historical resources on Finnish immigration to the United States and Canada:
Niemi, Mari. “Hunger or Yearning for Freedom? Migration from South Ostrobothnia to North America.” Journal of Finnish Studies. Vol. 2, No. 1, December 1998. Website: www.shsu.edu/eng_ira/finnishstudies/Finnish%20Tables%20of%20Content/JoFs_Vol%202.2.pdf.
Puümala, Lana. “Themes on Finnish Settlement in the Thunder Bay Area.” Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario, 2004. Website: https://knowledgecommons.lakeheadu.ca/bitstream/handle/2453/4048/PuumalaL2004m-1a.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y.
Spiegel, Taru. “The Finns in America.” Library of Congress. March 9, 2022. Website: www.loc.gov/rr/european/FinnsAmer/finchro.html.
Keywords/Metatags: Finland, Suomi, Kinship, Genealogy, Finnish Immigration, Finnish-Americans, Upper Peninsula, Michigan, Finnish Immigration United States, Adoption, Adoptee Rights, Human Rights, Michigan Legislature, Adoption Laws, Finland Travel, Finland History, Finland Culture, South Ostrobothnia, Sisu, Alahärmä, Kortesjärvi, Kurikka, Tampere, Finland Civil War, Kalevala, Elias Lönnrot, Winter War, Continuation War, World War II, World War I
(First published, Nov. 5, 2023; last updated, Nov. 12, 2023)