Court records for Elin Juhont Wuonnala

[Katie]

I have uploaded the Hiski death entry for Elin Juhont Wuonnala for your reference. She died from svårmod which I understand to be possible suicide. I contacted phpBB with a question about her death and was told that because the day she died and the date of burial are 9 months apart it is possible there may have been an inquest to determine what caused her death. I looked in Sukihistoria for Salla (where she lived)and found an option for Court Reports and I am wondering if there could have been court records of her inquest stored in Sukihistoria but I am not sure what parish or county it would have been recorded by looking at the regions in Salla. I guess I need some guidance as to what to do to obtain a transcript (translated into English) of an inquest, if there was one. Is this at all possible for me to look into?

[timotk]

Katie,
My best guess is that the court proceedings of Salla are located in OMA (Oulun Maakunta-arkisto, a branch of the National Archive). I am afraid that they are not digitized yet.

My experience of a similar visit is that you get the archival files by entering the archive building, fill in the form to order the books, and after some time you can get the book(s) for your study. Then with good luck you can photograph the documents yourself, post-process the images for better readibility and print if you like. What you get is quite cryptic. You need to break three barriers. 1) handwriting 2) old Swedish 3) law jargon. I would assume that the document is long with witness statements etc. Of course very interesting but very tedious work and you need various skills, perseverance and commitment.

You may ask OMA customer service if they do it or part of it against your order. You can mail to: arkisto@narc.fi which is the same email address for all National archive branches. So if you do write, specify clearly what kind of commissioning you are planning. I guess that getting the pages photographed by OMA is the easiest part for which you may get a standard price list for your evaluation.

The work of locating the document you are asking for requires a reasonable amount of work. There may persons who would perform this search without being paid for, but such good souls are quire rare, I am afraid.

Since the date of burial of Elin exists, it may mean that the court declared that she may have been buried more or less normally. I have seen a couple of cases where the date of burial is missing and my unconfirmed conclusion is that in those cases the suicide was regarded as a crime.

[Katie]

Hello, Tim
Thank you for your advice, I knew it would be hard to get records from that long ago. I may send an email to see if my request turns up anything, you never know.
Thank You and have a nice weekend. What would we do without weekends.
Janice

[EevaH]

Janice, before you start pushing money into this endeavor, maybe you should find out if the burial date is correct in the HisKi burial log. It is clearly listed within the 1783 buried (previous burial 31 Dec 1782, next 9 Feb 1783). If the log is recorded in the same order in HisKi as the original, that might mean the the actual dates are something like: death 5.3.1783 and burial 15.3.1783. The burial log was filled more or less in burial date order, the figures 7 and 3 are in some writers hand almost impossible to distinguish and that old records are tricky to decipher. Unfortunately the original records are not even in National archives' digital data base, so I do not know how to find out. Anyone out there using OMA and wanting to help Janice with this? Or you could call/email OMA and ask for help on this before asking them to search the court books which is time consuming and probably costly.

The reason I got suspicious is that those dates do not make sense to me. There is half a year between death and burial and no inquest will explain this long difference. Sometimes you see drowned people buried the next spring, but in North Finland ice melts in May or so and no drowned people can surface in March when the ice is 1-2 feet thick. Also I have never seen a suicide not mentioned in burial record, even thou it was often "explained away" as delirium, depression, etc. as it was a crime at the time and the deceased was not buried in consecrated ground if s/he was considered to have been in sound mind.

Of course I may be wrong and I apologize in advance - but this is how I would approach this dilemma.

Happy hunting regardless!

Eeva

[timotk]

Oops,
I leaped into the suicide theory without realising that the dates should be checked first. But no great harm done yet. One of my important suicide cases was checked (i.e. the related dates) carefully from good sources, so I thought that this a similar case. Had the court records been in Helsinki I could have searched for and read the court records but alas, the archive is almost 300 km away.

[Katie]

Thank you for your advice, I'll check into it. It is certainly a mystery that would be nice to solve because of the length between the death and burial can create so many questions and theories as to what happened.
Thank you all for your help. I truly appreciate it.
Janice

[timotk]

Hi again,
I am not the best informed person to put this theory forward, but I have read on another forum that temporary burial grounds were common in places from where great distance alone and lack of proper roads made transportation impossible in summer. This death would fit to the assumption that in Salla such a remote burial place with hollow chambers may have existed. The body could be transported in deep frozen condition by sleigh in winter or very early spring to its final destination. Salla was such a sparsely populated area that it generally fits to this assumtion. I feel that such a transport was not registered as a note in the burial records. But as you well understand, I am lacking the hard evidence. I have not studied the map either to estimate the distance.

[Katie]

Hello, Tim
Thank you for that theory, I'll certainly take that into consideration. It sounds plausible.
Jan

[Katie]

Hello, I was thinking of Elin's suicide and one thing I have not heard is disease. In the 1700's amd 1800's Rabies and Syphillis had spread throughout Europe and into the Scandanavian countries. Rabies started with infected wolves then spread to small animals and across the continent and up into Scandanavia. Someone who has late stage rabies would show signs of mental illness until the actual rabies kills the person. Same with Syphillis, as it progresses it attacks the brain and the person would show signs of what would look like mental illness. Not much was known then but, when you consider Elin was in her 60's , she could have been a victim of a disease that would attack the brain. There is also Alzheimers and she would have mental challenges,and could have harmed herself. The court reports would definitely spell out the months preceding her death what her state of mind was. A lot of the diseases we have names for today aren't always recorded in death records of the middle ages. I hope I hear back from that agency that keeps the records. I'd be glad to pay if it was not an unusally high amount. Would love to see what would cause a 60 year old woman to die from a mental issue.
Thank You
Janice

[timotk]

> Hello, I was thinking of Elin's suicide "
My bet is: 95% probability for temporary burial and 5% for suicide. Since I live in the South I am not so used to the former practice that was common in the North (just to explain my first reaction and response).

"Rabies started with infected wolves ..."
I have found one death case where a man was bitten by a wolf, got rabies (orig: wattuskräck) and died. If you use that keyword you may find some 20 instances of wattuskräck deaths in Hiski.
A man whom I know was bitten in Africa by a mad dog which was later on diagnosed to carry rabies. He got serum very soon and learned that he had 50% chance of surviving. The disease hibernates and if it strikes you have very little chance of making it. It kills rather quickly.

Syphilis does get into brain sometimes and creates things you described.

[Katie]

Thank you for your reply, I truly appreciate it. I'll put that in my comments for Elin that there is no definitive answer and that it may have been a temporary burial, or maybe not.
Thanks again.
Janice