Help finding great great grandparents named Alto
Lähetetty: 14.02.2018 23:21
I started researching using ancestry.com trying to find my great grandparents on my dad's side named Alto. I have very little information, and my living mother has a shockingly lacking amount of information about my dad's relatives. I quickly came to a dead end trying to bridge the gap from Finland to USA. My dad was Allen E. Alto and his parents were Ida E. Holland and Charles E. Alto. From what I found so far, Ida was born in Massachusetts in 1899 and Charles was born in Loimaa Finland either in 1886 or 1888 (not sure because the age/date written on census and draft cards is different at times). Charles came to USA in 1906 from one source I found. On his draft card he used the name Carl. One thing I found shows an Ida Holland with a mother Nygard that may or may not be correct.
I've searched quite a few online sources and I don't find any Alto with similar first names that match those dates in Finland. When I search for "finnish name alto" on google, one source says Alto is a respelling of Aalto, which made me think maybe they changed names from Aalto or Aaltonen or similar. Also I started thinking since Charles used Carl maybe they changed his name from Kaarl or Karl, but I don't find any matches that look right using those names either.
I'd like to know from more experienced people if it's worth paying ancestry.com $44.95 for the world sources or if it would make more sense to try and contact some public sources in Finland and possibly paying for that. In other words, where can I look and what can I conclude about what I found above? It's extremely difficult looking at old documents in another language written in cursive and I don't want to waste time searching completely wrong places. Today I spent hours just trying to figure out if Loimaa is the proper location and searching for baptism and birth records, which led to nothing.
I've searched quite a few online sources and I don't find any Alto with similar first names that match those dates in Finland. When I search for "finnish name alto" on google, one source says Alto is a respelling of Aalto, which made me think maybe they changed names from Aalto or Aaltonen or similar. Also I started thinking since Charles used Carl maybe they changed his name from Kaarl or Karl, but I don't find any matches that look right using those names either.
I'd like to know from more experienced people if it's worth paying ancestry.com $44.95 for the world sources or if it would make more sense to try and contact some public sources in Finland and possibly paying for that. In other words, where can I look and what can I conclude about what I found above? It's extremely difficult looking at old documents in another language written in cursive and I don't want to waste time searching completely wrong places. Today I spent hours just trying to figure out if Loimaa is the proper location and searching for baptism and birth records, which led to nothing.