This edition of the Occasional Dispatch looks at a personal example of how brothers born in the US moved back to Finland with their Finnish family, returned to the US several years later and ended up with totally different last names. There is an explanation you likely haven’t heard before.
We often hear stories about how names were changed at the port of entry because of spelling and pronunciation issues. In my family’s case it was the simple use of the patriarchal naming system used by many coming from Finland. My great-grandfather was Johan Victor Lillvik. When my grandfather Victor arrived in Boston, he used the name Johnson – son of Johan. So did his older sister, Maria (Mary) and two brothers, William and Edward. All four Johnsons lived in Quincy, MA at various times.
In Quincy, Grandfather married Olga, returned to Finland with three sons, and resumed using the name Lillvik. Eventually, two of the brothers, my father Karl Wilhem and my uncle Arthur returned to America.
When I was growing up in New Jersey, I asked my father several times, “Why is Uncle Arthur’s name Johnson and ours Lillvik?” .
He never explained.
He used to say, “There are no other Lillviks in America.” In one sense he was right. His brother Edward Lillvik, with whom he had no contact, lived in Finland, as did his sister Vivi and his mother. As far as he knew, no one else in the States had the Lillvik name but us. In the ‘50s there was no Ancestry.com or easy access to historical records to disprove that.
For years as my travels in the Army took me around the country, I checked every telephone book I could find looking for another Lillvik. I never found one.
Nearly twenty years after my father died, my daughter, Carla Lillvik, working as a librarian received an email from a man, Lasse Gardt, in Sweden who said his grandmother who had moved to Sweden from Lappfjärd, Finland was named Lillvik. He wanted to know if my daughter was a relative. I got in touch with him and found out he had been to the church in Lappfjärd and found family information that showed that his grandmother was a Lillvik and we are 3rd cousins. My sister and I visited with him in Finland and Sweden while searching for relatives with little luck.
For years as my travels in the Army took me around the country, I checked every telephone book I could find looking for another Lillvik. I never found one.
Shortly afterwards, in 2004, I stumbled on a Talko posting by Jeanette Johnson who was looking for people with the name Lillvik. Her grandfather was a Lillvik before coming to America and began using the name Johnson. He was my grandfather’s brother, making her my 2nd cousin. We began to search together for our family history. Briefly, we found that 3 Lillvik brothers and a sister came to America and used the name Johnson. My grandparents returned to Finland. My grandfather’s three siblings that remained in the US settled in Massachusetts, Washington, and Oregon. Among them they had 5 daughters and 12 sons, all first cousins all using Johnson except the women who married and assumed their spouses’ names. Of those seventeen cousins, only my family are Lillviks.
How did that come to be? At ages 21 and 20 my father and his brother, Arthur, living in Finland and wanting to come to America, began their quest for proof of US citizenship. They took different approaches. My father wrote to the church in Quincy and obtained his baptismal certificate that included the name Karl Wilhelm Johnson Lillvik. Instead of contacting the church, Uncle Arthur wrote to the Quincy City Clerk’s Office and received a birth certificate with his name as Johan Arthur Johnson. Different sources. Different names.
The mystery as to why two brothers had different last names has been solved!
My father died at age 80 not knowing he had cousins all around the country. Even though Johnson is the 2nd most common surname in the U.S., it is possible we may be cousins.
