Thursday, 6 October 2016
Soldier Nicknames: Heard in Finnish, Written in Swedish
A research note on the problem of soldier additional names in the Pori Regiment muster book during Gustav III's Russian War (1788–1790) — how Finnish spoken names were distorted when written down by Swedish-speaking clerks.
One of the everyday challenges in Finnish genealogical research is the discrepancy between how names were spoken and how they were written. This is particularly acute in military records of the Swedish era, where Finnish-speaking soldiers reported their names orally to Swedish-speaking or bilingual clerks. The result is a rich variety of phonetic spellings, mishearings and outright transformations.
The Pori Regiment (Porin läänin jalkaväkijoukot) muster book from Gustav III’s Russian War (1788–1790) provides several instructive examples.
Abraham and Gabriel → Aapo and Kaapo
The biblical names Abraham and Gabriel were used in Finland in the vernacular Finnish forms Aapo and Kaapo respectively. A clerk hearing “Aapo” might write “Abraham”, or hearing “Kaapo” write “Gabriel”. When tracing a soldier in different sources, the researcher must be aware that Aapo in a Finnish church record may appear as Abraham in a Swedish military record, and vice versa.
Manu / Emanuel / Wigg
The name Emanuel, spoken as Manu in Finnish, appears in some muster rolls as “Wigg” — a nickname that has no obvious connection to the given name. Such soldier nicknames were often entirely arbitrary, assigned by the unit or based on some characteristic of the man, and they could replace the original name so thoroughly that the man’s baptismal name is hard to recover.
Kask and Bask
The soldier nickname Kask (a type of helmet) could be written as Bask by a clerk who misheard the initial consonant. For genealogists this means that two apparently different soldiers in different records may be the same man.
Lum and Blom
Similarly, the nickname Lum (or Lumb) can appear as Blom in some sources — a transformation that reflects both phonetic similarity and the tendency of clerks to regularise unfamiliar sounds into more familiar Swedish name forms.
Practical Consequences
These transformations are not merely of academic interest. They affect real genealogical research. A researcher tracing a soldier ancestor through muster rolls, church registers and poll tax records may be looking at different name forms in each source — forms that all refer to the same man. Awareness of the common patterns of transformation is essential for connecting records across sources.
The patterns identified here for the Pori Regiment during the 1788–90 war are likely to apply to other units and other periods as well.