Becoming Croatian

[barbender]

The Iron Range of Minnesota (towns like Hibbing, Virginia, and Mountain Iron) was a real melting pot. There were many Italians, Finns, Serbs, Croats, and others that immigrated and found work in the Iron mines. It's not unusual to see someone of mixed Finnish-Italian ancestry or other groups that didn't tend to mix much elsewhere. 

There are a lot of -ich names up there. FFOTS, that is analogous to "son", correct? 

Maybe I've told this before, I met a guy from Columbia once. The folks he was with were calling him Buković, we thought they were playing around and gave him a nickname to make him sound like a "Ranger". I got visiting with him, through very broken English he explained that his grandfather escaped Europe after WWII and went to Columbia. I asked, "what does Buković mean?" He kind of lit up, and said, "it mean, son of wolf...way better than son of b**** ha ha ha!"

So his name really was Buković🤷😂

[SwampDonkey]

Great detective work. Good to know family history. I have Scottish lineage traceable to William 'The Bruce' Wallace. Although none of the more recent ancestry had any title or aristocracy. A lot of the Scots who where farmers where drove out during the Highland or Lowland clearances when there was a shift in Agricultural practices in Scotland.

[Corley5]

My wife's family on her mother's side could qualify for Lithuania citizenship. They're full on Poles with a Catholic background that ended three or four generations or so back after the family came to Philadelphia where they opened a fruit market. But there's a Lithuania Jewish connection in the Old World and we all know what happened in WWII. This is what would qualify them for Lithuania citizenship. 

[firefighter ontheside]

Yes, the ich or ić means son of.  There is a town near where my family came from called Modruś.  Presumably that's where my family line originated.  There was someone called Modruś.

There is a common misconception that a lot of names were changed at Ellis Island.  It did happen, but not very often.  Ellis Island employed people who spoke the languages to make sure they got the names right.  Of course, they weren't responsible when someone gave the wrong name.  When a fluent and literate Croatian speaker is told a Croatian name, he knows how to spell it.  A lot,of the folks coming over were illiterate.  Names could even be spelled wrong in their native country due to illiteracy.  My name is Modrosic, supposed to be Modrusic.  I am friends with a Modrošić in Croatia.  Her name should be Modrušić, but someone in her past spelled it wrong.

[barbender]

In Finnish, it is -nen. I think it has the sense of "of" or "from" because sometimes it means the son of someone, other times the place they are from. Maki to Makinen for an example.

There are a lot of Finns up here, from the UP of Michigan to North Dakota. My wife has Finnish ancestry. 

Some of the earliest settlers in North America were Finns and Swedes in the Chesapeake Bay area. It's thought that the later English settlers in the area learned log building construction from them, because that was a style of building not really found in England. So you had English building form coupled with
Scandinavian log building techniques, giving birth to something American- the dovetail log cabin so prevalent in the Appalachians. 

More interesting Finnish trivia- many of the Finns that came to the Iron Range had strong communist leanings. In the 1930's, the Soviets had active agents up there and convinced many Finns to come to the Soviet Union, where they could form a Finnish Socialist State in Karelia. I don't know how many went, but it wasn't a small number. 

I can't imagine making the voyage with the whole family from Finland to northern MN, then going all the way back to Russia!

When they got back there, things were in for a bit, but then Stalin's purges began. Since most of the Finns were quite nationalist, most of the men disappeared in the night. 

The former leader of the Communist Party of the US was a Finn from little Makinen, MN which is a township up on the edge of the Iron Range.