In 2023, I immersed myself in my Finnish heritage and connected with my Finnish kin in Finland.
This marks the first Christmas in my life that I have contact with my biological relatives in Finland. This followed a wonderful trip I made in September 2023 to Finland, one of the ancestral countries of my birth mother.
We had only known each other in the month before I flew to Helsinki, after my search combined with good fortune and the kindness of a stranger helped re-connect familial bonds that had thrived decades between relatives in my birth state of Michigan and Finland.
I published a long-form story about that in November 2023. I highlighted our shared family history and how the inequitable system of U.S. adoption and discriminatory laws in Michigan still deny such connections to likely tens of thousands of adoptees relinquished in Michigan.
In Finland, to my amazing surprising, one of my biological family relatives shared with me a stack of letters and photos sent and shared by our shared relatives in Michigan—my maternal grandmother’s extended family. That stack of documents included letters stretching over decades and family photos that showed my Michigan family—including my birth mother as a young child!
Since coming home, my relatives in Finland and I have stayed in touch. We’ve done a few video calls and have shared messages through WhatsApp, which many tech-savvy Finns love to use. It’s an easy way to reach them. It encourages communications that make me feel much closer to this land of a quarter of my biological kin and their ancestors. My search for my past also opened up a world of discovery for me about Finland, a country voted six times in a row as the world’s happiest country.
Because of Finland’s amazing successes promoting human happiness and health, population health, and the “greater good” for its people, I have also have become more than smitten by my genealogical ties to Suomi, as Finland is pronounced and spelled in its delightfully distinct Finno-Ugric language.
I received a new name this year, courtesy of my Finnish nieces I met for the first time in September 2023.
Soon after I came back from Finland, I received a delightful family video shared with me by some of my relatives. They gathered together to wish me well, calling me “Uncle Rudy.” I earned this loving moniker because I have four distant nieces in this family (and I have another niece with another distant cousin, who I met as well). I loved it.
I felt something I had felt before—a biological kinship to younger children who all shared my genes. I was their “Uncle Rudy,” which in Finnish translates to “Rudy-setä.” I have now fully embraced this title, given to me by the young ones. It turned out to be the unexpected gift of 2023 that I could never have predicted when the year started.
This Christmas card was sent by one of my U.S. biological relatives to their Finnish relatives in 1947. My extended in family in Finland returned this card, to me, when I found and met them in Finland in September 2023.
As Christmas arrived this December, I shared a photo of a Christmas card a Finnish-American relative of mine shared with relatives in Finland in 1947, written in Finnish of course, as the U.S. relatives were bilingual. I wrote: “What an amazing thing to discover that holiday greetings were shared between family through the 1940s, and later. So I wanted to renew the old tradition, one of those Christmas cards sent from U.S. family in 1947, and perhaps start a new tradition.”
My relatives in Finland replied with similar holiday wishes, family photos, and shots of their homes decked out for the Christmas holiday. It was nice to have this connection, from halfway across the world, in a place filled with snow.
It is richly empowering to everyone to know they have kin and relatives, in the United States and also in countries around the world. All of the millions of adoptees in the United States, born there and abroad, have an inherent human right to share this connection to their kin and relatives, if that is a mutually shared wish.
I received wonderful Christmas wishes from Finland on Christmas Eve this year, from my Finnish relatives in Finland (hyvää joulua).
Earlier today, on Christmas, Dec. 25, 2023, I used the special occasion to advocated with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to support the restoration of basic human rights to all Michigan-born adoptees. The best way that the fellowship and good will of the holiday can be shared, through the passage of possible legislative reform in Michigan, is to make it possible that all of us can know who our kin are and to feel the bonds of fellowship with those with whom we share a collective biological kinship. This is called being human. We all have a right to this condition by birth.
Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all, especially to those who may still not know their kin, their past, and their truth because of laws like those still enforced and in place in my birth state, Michigan.