Yes, I know you don’t give a hoot about my genetic inheritance – but I’m beginning to

I’m a bit of a mess, genes-wise. The best guess is that I’m 25% Finn, 25% Norwegian, 37.5% Scottish (of one sort or another) and 12.5% Irish (Ulster). There may also be some Swede in there as well. I suspect that’s as close as I’m ever going to get to an understanding of my origins, and it’s probably massively wrong. I could get one of those £99 DNA tests – but they sound far too cheap to be accurate: I think I’ll just carry on enjoying the uncertainty.

Physically, I suppose I look slightly more Scandinavian than anything else. From personal observation, I probably look more Danish than Swedish or Norwegian, but I’ve more often been mistaken for German, and a Danish girl once told me I didn’t look in the least Danish (but she might just have been trying to brush me off). I tend to blend in when visiting the inter-coastal parts of America, until I open my mouth – but given the genetic variety enjoyed by Americans, that doesn’t mean much.  A female friend once made me feel oddly proud by saying she’d always imagined me as the captain of a Norwegian fishing boat – I’d happily settle for that.

Whatever the mixture, I’m definitely a Northern European mongrel.

As I’ve probably mentioned before, the assumption of Finnishness derives from a business trip my brother made many years ago to Helsinki, where, leafing through the city telephone directory (as you do) he discovered a whole slew of Grönmarks (the umlaut in Swedish and Finnish performs the same function as the line through the “o” in Norwegian and Danish, although “ø” is a separate letter of the alphabet, while the umlaut is just an accent indicator – if you’re still awake). As far as we were aware at the time, we were the only Grønmarks in Norway, which is odd, because it roughly translates as the rather prosaic-sounding “Greenfield”.  A quick trawl of the internet seems to confirm that it is, indeed, a Finnish name.

So how did a family with a Finnish surname end up in Norway (I didn’t hear you ask).  There have been two main periods of Finnish migration to the country of my birth. The first lasted from the late 16th to the mid-17th Century, and involved the so-called Forest Finns of both Sweden and Norway, who were entirely assimilated into the local cultures many moons ago. The 18th and 19th centuries saw two waves of fresh migration by Finnish peasants and fishermen to Troms and Finnmark in Northern Norway, where they were known as Kvens (for reasons I needn’t go into.) This was an extension of a general migration of Finns into the Sami territories of Finland and Sweden . The second wave was partly due to a boom in the Norwegian fishing industry, and partly due to the fact that it was easier to migrate to America from Norway than from Finland.

Although initially welcomed by the Norwegian government, the Kvens (along with the Sami) became the target of a 19th Century cultural assimilation policy known as Norwegianisation – strangely, both groups were considered a security risk and were monitored by the security police right up until the 1970s, schools were forbidden to teach Finnish, the sale of land to people with non-Norwegian surnames was prohibited, and, in 1870, the Norwegian Ministry of Defence demanded that all Finnish/Kven names be removed from maps.

Now, in our more touchy-feely, inclusive age, the Kvens are recognised as a national minority, and, since 2005, their language and culture have been officially protected. Depending on which definition of Kven is applied, there are between 10,000 and 60,000 of them – most of whom don’t speak Finnish and consider themselves to be either fully Norwegian or Sami.

As the Grønmarks were ensconced in a wood-milling town in the far south of the country, just a few miles from the Swedish border, we can assume they never migrated to Northern Norway, but they might have entered the country (along with many other 19th Century Finns) with an eye to emigrating to America at some stage – only they got stuck in Norway for a while.

As far as we know, my father was the only Grønmark to make the trip across the Atlantic. According to official records, ten males emigrated from Kristiania (now Oslo) to North America in November 1926. One of them was Olai Julius Grønmark, who was 18 at the time. He described himself as a “cellulose worker”, had 300 Kroner to his name (roughly £30 now – no idea what it was worth then) and sailed for Canada on the Raffell Line ship, Blenheim. (I am indebted to my brother for all this fairly recently-unearthed information.) It’s hard to imagine what it must have been like for a boy of 18 (albeit a pretty damned hefty one) who didn’t speak a word of English – let alone French - to leave everything he’d known behind in order to travel thousands of miles in winter to a vast, alien country just as cold as the one he’d left behind.  According to his emigration form, our father was leaving “in hope of a better life”. What with all the lumberjacking and mining in the great, frozen Canadian hinterland, it was certainly a more expansive existence than the one he forsook - and it's unlikely he'd have ended up as a WWII RAF bomber pilot or marrying a Scot had he stayed behind.

As I said, I have no intention of getting a DNA test – but, should I ever recover from this annoying fatigue thing, I’ll be heading straight for Finland: we were planning a trip there (my wife went a few years’ ago) when I fell ill. If, upon arriving, I burst into tears, fall to the ground and kiss the tarmac, I’ll know with certainty that I’m at least a bit of a Finn (I’m not sure that swooning to Sibelius counts as sufficient proof).

I’ll end this rambling post by pointing out that my son has not only inherited my genes, but has a bit of extra Scots,  some Saxon, probably some Norman and possibly a bit of Huguenot as well. A rich enough mixture for anyone, I’d have thought.