Kinship and ethnic ancestries matter in our bones

During the last two months, I have had some profoundly memorable conversations with my friend. He is an adoptee like me who discovered his maternal kin and ancestry later in life as an adult.

Like me, my friend was denied his true vital records and kinship information by law. In his case, Washington state denied him equal treatment by law in accessing his original vital records. Despite laws denying him absolutely vital information about who he is and from whence he came, he was able to find his family by perseverance and hard work.

Only this weekend, after we talked our family histories and DNA search tools in greater depth, did I make an important realization about his kinship and ethnic ties to his Jewish ancestors in Europe. He acknowledged that his Jewish heritage to kin that once lived in Europe means he had distal kin and ancestors who were murdered in the Holocaust. It is a heavy load to carry.

Then it dawned on me how important this is for him.

He was intensely interested in the amazing and true story of Auschwitz survivor and escapee Rudolf Vrba, who published a memoir of his feats in 1963 called “I Escaped from Auschwitz.”

I had told him about the book and shared with him an essay I wrote and published about Vrba and fellow escapee Alfred Wetzler in late December 2022. He then listened to an audiobook recording of Vrba famous co-written memoir, with Irish journalist Alan Bestic, and expressed profound awe of Vrba’s heroism and success alerting the world about the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. That warning ultimately saved the lives of 200,000 Hungarian Jews.

Last weekend we talked more about what being an American distal relative means to someone with Jewish ancestors.

He clearly knows this means that European kin of their shared Jewish ancestors were murdered by Nazis in the Holocaust, which claimed up to 6 million Jewish civilian lives alone.

I then told him about my trip to Poland in July 2000, when I was working on my Holocaust and Nazi concentration and death camp photo project. My friend solemnly acknowledged his roots likely lie in a shtetl somewhere in Europe, and that the fate of those there likely ended in World War II, probably in one of the Nazi death camps built in Poland. (See this powerful 1996 PBS Frontline documentary on the fate of Jewish civilians in just one historic shtetl, Bransk.)

My friend appreciated my story visiting one of the long-gone shtetls in Poland, the small village of Cieszanów, Poland. While the town remains, the Jewish inhabitants do not. I travelled there with a Polish Holocaust tour guide and a fellow American, on our day-long trip to the former death camps of Sobibor and Belzec, which were two of the three death camps in eastern modern-day Poland where Nazis killed approximately 600,000 civilians, most Jews.

On our short visit to this small Jewish town, we visited the long-desecrated synagogue. It was already in terrible condition in July 2000, and Google shows it looks worse today. My fellow American traveler that day lit a candle in the overgrown former Jewish cemetery close by, in honor of some friends, whose family could trace their origins to this community.

What is painful to me as an adoptee is knowing my friend was denied knowledge of his likely blood-kinship ties to places like this in Europe. The state of Washington did not help him—in fact, they still deny all adoptees equal rights to their vital records, and thus their ability to know where they trace their lineage, kin ties, ethnicity, and vital ancestral stories.

This is one of the more horrible cruelties of this system as it exists today in the United States, with a patchwork of mostly discriminatory laws denying millions of persons their family history, medical history, kin relations, and ethnic identity as a matter of law.

As an adoptee rights advocate for years, I have long argued that all of us, every single one of us, everywhere in the world, regardless of the systems that brought us into the world, have an inherent human right to know who we are and from whence we come. Global systems like adoption, which are still beloved by many, including many on the “progressive” political spectrum today in the United States, deny this and perpetuate harm to generations now

My hidden and severed kin ties to Finland

I write about this issue in my book, particularly how I discovered my ethnic identity linked to Wales and England and also to Finland on my birth mother’s side after I was 24 years old.

These stories, as I could tell from my friend, matter in our bones. And I felt a special privilege that I could let him know I was once able to visit a shtetl for others, when he may not get that chance.

In my book, I paid homage to celebrated African American author Alex Haley,  author of Roots. The celebrated and pathbreaking novel details the history of his family and their journey from a village in Africa, to chattel slavery for generations, and to eventual freedom. Haley’s words describe why these ties matter that we can feel in our bones. “In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage—to know who we are and where we have come from…Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness.”

During my conversations with my fellow adoptee friend, I shared my story about my Finnish ancestral ties.

My biological maternal grandmother is Finnish American, born in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where many Finnish immigrants to the United States arrived at the end of the 19^th century and beginning of the 20^th century.

According to the U.S. Library of Congress, the 1920 Census again showed that Michigan and Minnesota were home to the largest numbers of Finnish-Americans, with about one-third of the total U.S. population born in Finland evenly divided between each state.  I’m a descendant of this group who settled in the Upper Peninsula to do unpleasant things like timber harvesting and iron ore mining, and maybe some fishing on the side. No wonder my grandmother left there at an early age.

Since finding out I had at least one-quarter Finnish ancestry, I have celebrated my Finnish roots.

For the past few years, I’ve been honoring Kalevala Day, a national holiday in Finland celebrated each year on February 28. The day honors the national long-form epic poem called the Kalevala that was  published in 1849 (as the “New Kalevala” compared to the earlier “Old Kalevala”) by the folklorist Elias Lönnrot.

Working as a doctor in rural areas, Lönnrot for years travelled widely in rural areas of Finland and the Karelian region collecting folk poetry that was usually sung, similar to epic poems of other cultures historically. The stories and poems are part of the Arctic region’s rich oral tradition, passed down in Balto-Finnic languages for at least two millennia.

I recently found an English translation on Project Gutenberg. I also just started reading the Old Kalevala, and I am enjoying it. The Kalevala is a type of storytelling so unlike Western traditions, and full of earthy descriptions that touch on many senses. Here is a small sampling of the story and a description of Lemminkainen, one of the poem’s main hero characters:

Straightway Lemminkainen journeyed
With the maidens to the castle;
There he sang and conjured pitchers
On the borders of the tables,
Sang and conjured golden goblets
Foaming with the beer of barley;
Sang he many well-filled vessels,
Bowls of honey-drink abundant,
Sweetest butter, toothsome biscuit,
Bacon, fish, and veal, and venison,
All the dainties of the Northland,
Wherewithal to still his hunger.

The famed fantasy writer J.R.R. Tolkien was so smitten by the Kalevala as a young man in 1911, he attempted to read it in the original Finnish. He called the Kalevala a collection of “wild” and “uncivilized and primitive tales.” He borrowed many stories from it for his mythical work called the Silmarillion, and he patterned his self-created Elvish language from modern Finnish language spoken and written today.

As a longtime Tolkien fan, perhaps it is just normal that I also am drawn to this tale, as I am to most folk stories from around the world.

I also am drawn to my Finnish ancestry because of the land’s harshness and how its weather and landscape shaped the character of today’s modern Finland.

It is a country that repelled a brutal and unprovoked invasion by the USSR and dictator Josef Stalin in 1939 and early 1940 called the Winter War. Historically, it is one of the few lands in northern Europe that also repelled Viking incursions, when nearly every other location from Constantinople to modern-day Russia to England and mainland Europe succumbed. The normally terrifying Vikings fled due to the ferocity and tactics of the stubborn local residents.

Finns call this historic trait of defiance and stubbornness “Sisu,” which translates to never giving up.

After I found my maternal biological family in the late 1980s, they shared with me some historic photos of Finnish ancestors. They are a very tough looking bunch. Despite their rough edges, the Finns perfected the sauna. They also like coffee and Nordic skiing, as I do. Today they have perhaps one of the world’s best national health systems and national education systems, outperforming the United States in nearly all key measures.

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, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. 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.

I recently decided that I will adopt a uniquely Finnish “brand” for some of my future communications. I have chosen the Hannunvaakuna, a symbol seen widely in Finland. It can be seen on book covers, like the one above for the Old Kalevala, in photos of stone art, and on all kinds of Finnish things. The Finnish biathlon team also slapped it on their badass team uniform in 2015 tooI have seen variations of this in Native American art, and there was no cultural connection between these parts of the world—so it has a universality to it. I am working on putting this symbol on my next hoodie.

I also am looking ahead now to planning a trip to Finland, mostly because I have long wanted to visit one of my ancestral homes. I will probably look like many people there, because genetically I am connected to the people who call it home.