Monday, 26 September 2016
A Small Find on the Map
A 1650 map of Ylä-Satakunta shows the village name "Meürenen" — confirming that Mäyränen and Meuronen are variant spellings of the same name, both deriving from the word for badger.
Finland’s earliest regional maps were drawn by land surveyors in the mid-17th century. The oldest known map of Ylä-Satakunta has been dated to 1650.
In a detail from that map showing the Kolkinlahti area, the farm name Mäyränen appears in the spelling Meürenen — with an e and a German y. The other farms visible in the same detail are Pohjaslahti, Kangasjärvi, Myry and Laasoniemi.
This spelling is significant. The name Mäyränen is based on the Finnish word mäyrä (badger). The related name Meuronen, found in parish records from Lapee in Karelia, appears to be a variant spelling of exactly the same name. The spelling Meürenen on the 1650 map bridges the two forms — it is neither purely Finnish nor purely Swedish in its conventions, but phonetically it fits both Mäyränen and Meuronen.
For genealogical research this matters: someone tracing ancestors named Mäyränen in western Finland and someone tracing ancestors named Meuronen in Karelia may be working toward the same family root.
Source: vanhakartta.fi, accessed 25 September 2016.