Finnish American Reporter July 2026 | Your Own Ancestry Book

Modern Finnish Genealogy - Greg Isola

Ideas in this article can likely be adapted to include other formats and ancillary relatives, but my intention here is to present an idea for recording your direct lines of ancestry for your children and grandchildren, not intending to include uncles, aunts, cousins, etc. but solely your collected information on your direct ancestors.

We have all struggled with the idea of how to prepare our research for our children and grandchildren so we have talked extensively recently about charting extended generations of ancestors on four-, five-, and six-generation charts and lists. This book idea came to me recently and had become one of the many projects that consume my genealogy time in recent months.

This idea is to prepare a book of ancestors using the Ahnentafel numbering which allows you to continue on and include all the ancestor data as far as we would like and as far as our research has taken us. The charts that you have made will be good companions to this book. The numbering, all being consistent, will make for easy reference between the two.

There are many online book printing services that would serve you well. Making it a 5x8 format would create a very handy handbook size which you could get printed and distribute to your children and grandchildren.

In my idea, I have numbered my four children all as number 1, the initial people (or starting point) for this ancestry list. In that numbering, I am 2 and my wife, their mother, is 3 in the ahnentafel numbering. In the next generation, their grandparents, my parents are 4 and 5 and my in-laws are 6 and 7. Their great-grandparents are 8-15 and so on for each further generation.

Using my children's names, of course, I titled the book “The Ancestry of Child 1 Isola, Child 2 Isola, Child 3 Isola and Child 4 Isola.”

In the initial pages of the book before I start listing the ancestors and their data, I include several items of explanation that will hopefully be useful to my children and any other readers:
Copyright 2026 © Gregory S. Isola
Printed in Minneapolis
Genealogical data is not copyrightable
but presentation and format are.

Index

[^ Include in the Index all the abbreviations that you end up using in your book.]

Using Ahnentafel numbering

short link* https://gene.mn/lugiN

Initial person 1 with siblings
Person: n
Father: 2n (even)
Mother: 2n+1 (odd)

Old Finnish used W for V and often B for P. Finnish/Swedish additional characters: Ää, Öö, Åå.

Typestyles: Arial and Fraktur
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraktur
and short link* https://gene.mn/HmPeJ

Notable Ancestors

Under Notable Ancestors, I will list some specific family surnames along with the number to find that specific person.

Here or throughout the book, include family stories that talk about the family surname, its changes, or other notable parts of your specific family history.

I like to use Fraktur typestyle for the old Finnish spellings as well as there are Russian ancestors with surnames that I will spell with English letters and also in the original Cyrillic alphabet.

Putting surnames in all caps like ISOLA is not considered standard practice in modern genealogy but I like to put it that way in my work to clearly delineate surnames from the other names, like true patronyms. Andersson, Isaacsson, etc. could be true patronyms from the "old country" or fossilized surnames/family names in our modern American understanding.

Then start listing the ancestors in pairs with their relevant data:

You could of course use bold or italics to highlight certain information. For example, names: 2 Gregory Scott ISOLA.

For burials, include the Findagrave memorial number (FAG#) which is briefly explained and referenced in the index. It is becoming a standard way to memorialize our ancestors' final resting places.

You can include, of course, more information about any particular ancestor, like military service, immigration, or a particularly important migration from one place to another. The beauty of this format is that it allows you to include additional lines of information depending on what is relevant about these ancestors.

For my dad, I will include a "mil" line to reference his WWII military service time and for my grandparents (my children's great-grandparents) I will include an "imm" line to show their immigration from Finland, etc.

If you work on this type of book for yourself and have a question, please feel free to ask me via email below. I would be happy to hear of your project and to interject my opinion on your question.

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*Full disclosure: the gene.mn shortlink*, if in this and previous and future articles, is a service of Genealogy.MN, wholly co-owned by this author and my son Abram Isola.

Thank you all for your continued dedication to these articles!

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Please feel free to send any questions, inquiries, or comments to my genealogy email greg@genealogy.mn. Thank you to those who have written wonderful emails to me!

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