Hujanen/Heino (and associated families)

The family surname has been Heino since Victor Heino changed it after immigrating to the USA. The surname back in Finland was (and is) Hujanen.

This screenshot shows the Heino/Hujanen family tree starting from the generation of my great-grandparents. It’s part of my full tree at Ancestry.com. If you have a membership, you can look at the full tree.

The known ancestors in my line since 1700 are at wikitree, which includes my grandparents.

Some of the names here are cut off a bit because of how Ancestry truncates longer names. The point here is to show the big picture, with more details provided in the pages for each part of the family tree.

Note the following about the families in this tree:

• As mentioned, the Heino family name was adopted in the US and the original family name was Hujanen.
• Lydia Nurro was born in Oulu in western Finland, where surnames developed later. Although her paternal ancestors had a surname that (rare for western Finland) goes back to the 16th century, (sometimes alternating with “Postila” after the family’s early association with mail delivery), her maternal ancestors frequently changed their last names, sometimes multiple times within a single person’s lifetime. This is similar to the practice that was widespread in Scandinavia.
• The only confirmed information about the Merten family is the given names of Maria Merten’s parents. I have researched possible ancestors but the surname and given names (Carl and Maria) are very common and her baptism record has not been found. That line remains a huge blank spot on my family tree.
• Norway through the end of the 19th century used patronymics in the vast majority of cases rather than surnames. Ancestors of Martha Green and Selma Halvorsen in Norway do not have consistent family names from generation to generation.
• The Johnson family name has been a surname for longer than the family branches in Norway, but it too was originally a patronymic (Janssen) in the low-German language West Frisian (and possibly before that the equivalent Dutch patronymic Jans).