I began planning a trip to Hiiumaa, Estonia, the island of my ancestors, during the pandemic. I wanted to take the kids for Christmas, taking advantage of the frozen sea to drive the 16 miles across the ice to the island. (The longest ice road in Europe.) I contacted my late father’s cousins, who had visited our ancestral home, and they enthusiastically gave me details from their trip. Then another lockdown came, and I was forced to abandon the idea.
After last summer’s vacation (road trip from Paris to Croatia including Italy, Bosnia and Slovenia) the kids requested something a bit cooler. As in, less than a hundred degrees, please. It was so hot in Dubrovnik that I dropped them off at a local swimming hole and visited the walled city on my own, with the dog.
Something cooler… It came to me in a flash. Estonia had to be cooler than Croatia…I didn’t need to check weather.com…just look at the map! It’s way north, next to Finland, where we had visited a few years back for an Arctic Christmas.
So I dug up the emails from my father’s cousin. He had mentioned that my family’s homestead had been made into a museum, and that a nearby graveyard held stones with our family name. I found lodging on the island, and bought one-way plane tickets, deciding to make it into a road trip through the Baltics ending in Berlin, where we had been offered a week-long apartment exchange.
After a day and a half in Tallinn, the kids and I set out in a rental car, driving to the port of Rohukula on Estonia’s west coast. One hour and fifteen minutes on a ferry landed us in Heltermaa, on Hiiumaa Island—OUR island, as I reminded the kids.
Tibor dampened my enthusiasm a tad by saying that my constant talk of visiting our ancestors reminded him of “White Woman’s Instagram,” in which Bo Burnham hilariously sends up people of my gender and race on the “preciousness” we exhibit on that platform. I decided to keep the bulk of my enthusiasm to myself, but couldn’t resist driving past the homestead museum after checking into our guest house.
We got lost looking for it, pulling off one of my specialties, which is driving way off the main road up a dirt track towards someone’s isolated home before realizing my GPS target was incorrect. Backtracking, we saw a sign with words that kind of looked like the museum. I had set my Google Translate app to Estonian-English, and focused the camera setting on the road sign. The words The Soera Farm Museum magically appeared. We had found it.
After a few minutes, we drove through a gate and into a parking lot surrounded by a group of old buildings with thatched roofs. A sign to one side had information in English. The museum was closed for the night but opened the next day at 11am. Perfect.
The sign held a map identifying the buildings. I glanced from it to the buildings in front of me: one building that looked like the main house. Around it were grouped a well and several smaller buildings, all with thatched roofs. “Your ancestors lived here,” I said to the kids as I got back in the car. The eye rolls were deafening. But I didn’t care.
The cousin’s email had included this suggestion: “Old cemetery between road from Kardla to Soera Farm Museum. Many Paljasma memorial markers.”
There were two roads from Kardla to Soera, and on the GPS no cemeteries appeared along them. We had driven down one already, keeping our eyes peeled. “I’ll drive back to Kardla down the only other road,” I said. “Let’s see if we can find the cemetery.”
We hadn’t driven two minutes when a large cemetery appeared on the left side of the road. “This has to be it!” I exclaimed and parked the car in front of a gate. A sign read that the cemetery had closed at 6pm. But the gate was knee-height.
“No one’s around,” I said. “Let’s jump the fence.”
Upon which Tibor’s head exploded. Figuratively. “We could get arrested. We could get in trouble. Mom, Mom. Don’t do it.”
I love going places I’m not supposed to go to. Urban exploring is a passion of mine. I am perfectly respectful of the places I visit. But for me, rules, fences, barriers, are a challenge that are begging to be overcome. My autism in this respect seems to be backward. (Although maybe it goes along with not recognizing social hierarchies?) But this does not compute with my rule-obsessed autistic son. I can’t even let him know when I go to the off-limit catacombs under Paris because he will worry the whole time.
I had to promise not to go before he would calm down. We would visit it the next morning. Fine. (Even though we were in the middle of the woods on a tiny island and it was my freaking ancestors who were in the cemetery.)
We drove back past emo cows and a rock cairn that was billed as “Hiiumaa’s Stonehenge.”
Just beside it was a huge boulder with a rickety wooden ladder propped up behind it, and a sign across the street that read “Vanapagana Kivi,” which Google translated as “Big Stone.” After seeing a few others, I discovered that the ladder up the back meant that it was one of Hiiumaa’s protected giant erratic boulders, deposited there by glacial movement.
The erratic stones turned out to be one of Tallie’s and my favorite features in Estonia. Everywhere on the island are single boulders sitting in the middle of fields. They seemed to have been used as markers of boundaries between property, with woods starting at one, or a field mown up to another. The perfect boundary, I suppose, since they would be difficult to move.
There were road signs with a certain symbol on them showing tourist sites, all in Estonian, so if something looked interesting, we stopped the car and I pointed my Google Translate lens at them.
We stopped at the Kärdla Meteorite Crater and an old church, and then headed back to Guest House Ratturi Talu, where we had rented a tiny cabin furnished only with four single beds. Toilets and showers were a walk across the grassy yard.
By the time we arrived, it was 10:30pm and the sun looked like this.
At 11am the next morning we were outside the Soera Farm Museum. A few cars were already parked in the parking lot. We ambled up to the informational sign and read the following overview:
We made our way to the largest building, the “barn dwelling” mentioned above, where we saw a family entering. A woman with a scarf tied over her hair, babushka-style, stood inside, tearing off paper tickets to give to guests.
She said something in Estonian, and seeing that I didn’t understand, pointed to the prices. When I gave her my card, she shook her head. “Cash only.” I gestured that we’d be back. She nodded, pointed to an old metal box with money inside and said, “Leave cash,” and then headed off toward one of the other buildings.
We drove to toward the closest town, located an ATM, and were back within a half hour. Take 2. The woman wasn’t there, so I left the money in the cashbox, wrote out the amounts on her ticket stubs (2 students, 1 adult), tucked that back into its blue cookie tin, and entered the first room.
I glanced at my phone, and read my father’s cousin’s instructions out to my kids.
“Make sure to stop at the Soerra Tallumeseam on the island of Hiiumaa. Taking a tour of the part that was a home you will see a dining table and on the wall behind the table there is a portrait painting which would be your great grandfather Priidu's (Fred) sister and her husband. I'm not certain if it is Leena or Liisu, but they were the last Paljasmaa to occupy the home.”
I looked up from my phone and saw this:
Here’s a close-up…
Can you feel my chills? From then on, for the next hour, there was no self-editing, no matter how many eye rolls I received. I told the kids, “This is what we came here for. After this and the cemetery, there will be no more ancestor-related activities. So let me enjoy today.”
They took that on board and let me wax ecstatically about everything, going out to wait for me in the yard when I took too long. (I couldn’t help peeking into drawers, which were full of records and knick-knacks. I had to physically restrain myself from going through it all, searching for Clues.)
I saw that my ancestors had to be incredibly self-sufficient. They made their own shoes, furniture, clothes (including spinning, weaving and sewing), they hunted, farmed, tended livestock. I assume that some things were bought—the rifles, pots and pans, tools—but it was rare to see something that wasn’t made in the house.
The “new” part of the house, the part with wooden floors, comprised two bedrooms, the main living/dining room and an adjoining workshop.
The original part of the house, with an earthen floor, was comprised of a dining room/workshop and a large room where a sign said that everyone slept on the floor except the elderly, ill or children, who were allowed to sleep on the platform above the oven.
There are so many more photos. I’m looking forward to getting home and inspecting them one by one. But these give you a good idea of what was in the large house. As for who lived in it, when I got back to the front hall I found this thumbtacked to the wall:
Going to my records, my paternal grandmother’s father, Priidu (Fred) Palasma (1874-1949) left Estonia and came through Canada to North Dakota in 1903. He married a woman named Ania (Anna) Wolberg (1884-1966). They had four children. My grandmother Alida was the youngest.
Priidu’s father was Simmo Paljasmaa (1837-?). Priidu’s mother was Anna Püss (1836-1908). You can see them on the first tree down, fourth couple from the left. So they are my great-greats.
Simmo’s father was Mihkel Paljasmaa (1806-1879). His mother was Liisa (Liso) Saue (1806-1876). Mihkel’s name is written across the top, saying he lived in the house from 1846-1879, and under that it says his wife was Nicola Tooma Liso. So they are my great-great-greats.
My records list Mihkel’s parents as Pendi Simmo Paljasmaa and Ann Mustik. Pendi’s father was “Tubala Simmo” (1776). His father was “Tubala Kreisi Jurna Pent (1746). His father was Kreisi Jüri (1704). His father was Soonlepa Jaagu Mihkel (somewhere around 1639-1732). His father was Soonlepa Jaak (between 1567 and 1687). They were all from Hiiumaa. And several of those names, in one form or another, show up on this older family tree. There were many similar names on Hiiumaa and I’m sure much intermarriage between towns. So who knows which of these are my direct ancestors? I assume some are.
I emerged from a barely-lit past that smelled like wood and smoke into a present, where the next generation of Paljasmaas sat outside on a rough-hewn log bench. Beneficent in their knowledge the torture wouldn’t last much longer, they followed me from building to building.
First was the small barn that the teenage girls were allowed to sleep in when the donkeys weren’t sheltering there from the winter. Half had been divided out into a gift shop. The next building, a larger barn called the “cattle shed”, was being used by a group of children who were doing arts and crafts. When I peeked inside, a woman used hand motions to ask if I had already bought a ticket. I said yes. “Good, then,” she said, and shooed us away. (The farm is also used as an educational center and a center for rock studies.)
We went down into the cellar, saw the summer kitchen and the well, and sat in the smoke sauna and smelled the smoke and imagined ourselves warming up while thick snow piled up outside and the cows and donkeys huddled in their shelters. (Or, I did.) A sign said the sauna was still being used, and there were plastic buckets stacked neatly outside the door, proving it.
When we had seen everything, I couldn’t resist going back to the farmhouse for one last visit…to take my own family photos. My kids could tell that by this point all resistance was futile.
On the way back to the car, I ducked in to a large building with farm equipment dating back at least a century. I enjoyed seeing that everything with wheels had a winter version, fitted out as sleds.
I had to use the outhouse (a toilet seat above a hole in the ground) before we left, and joked to my kids that it made me feel a bit closer to my ancestors. But in reality, I could only imagine the hardships (and hopefully some joy?) of living at the homestead.
We drove 5 minutes away to the cemetery. I promised we would be in and out of there in fifteen minutes, and kept good to my word, making the kids spread out and look for stones with Paljasmaa or something similar printed on it. (The spelling changes, sometimes dropping the “j” and often dropping the last “a.”)
Finally in the back row of the cemetery I found a couple of stones with our name.
We ate the sandwiches I had packed for us, and then continued on to a music museum and a tour of the island’s famous lighthouses. And though I left my family’s land behind, we were never too far on an island where it takes less than an hour to drive from one edge to the other.
That night I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about what this meant. What clues had I seen to my family’s history?
To be honest, I had never felt much of a kinship with this part of my family. I had naturally gravitated to my mother’s side of the family with their joyful eccentricities.
My father’s father was a silent man. A North Dakota cowboy. My grandmother taught him to read when he was 35, but he never learned to write. His parents came from Norway, and I felt a connection to that country the moment I stepped into Oslo.
But my father’s mother? She was a sour woman, never smiling, always critical and disappointed in everyone and everything. She was continuously sucking on cough drops and telling us not to do things. As a Nazarene, she considered almost everything a sin, including any music that wasn’t hymns, movies, jewelry, dice playing and “vanity.”
She wrote me letters on stationary printed with the rough wood of a cross, with messages like this one, when I was 25, “I live in pain every day. I just can’t wait until I get to the heavenly portals. Then, a little later you’re going to join me, Vivi. We won’t ever have to fear the deadly fires of Hell. Praise His Holy Name! We’re having spring-like weather now in October and we’re really enjoying it.”
My father wrote me once to explain. “Mom wanted to be a teacher like her two older sisters. Her dad said she couldn’t go to college because of her stuttering, saying she’d never amount to anything anyway. She said there was no affection from her father. It was all work – no time for fun.” And then he told about how she had to follow her father’s horse-pulled tractor and stack 20-pound bundles of grain. She did this from childhood until after she was married.
I struggle to recapture good memories of her. She loved board games, especially Parcheesi and Rack-O. She made lefsa, a potato-crepe that we spread with butter and sprinkled with sugar before rolling them up and eating them with our fingers. And she loved crossword puzzles, one thing I have definitely inherited from her.
But now I had a peek into what she came from. What her father had come from. I had seen where he had spent his early years. And I had visited the abandoned sod house standing in a field in North Dakota where my grandmother had been born and raised. I can imagine an inherited burden. Inherited depression. Bitterness. A desperate clinging to the only light to be imagined—a blissful afterlife in heaven.
And as I went to bed in the tiny wood cottage with a window looking out over a field, over my land, I resolved to stop rejecting this side of my lineage. I am strong enough now to incorporate it into who I am. Into what makes me.
And I resolved to return. By myself. On a mission to find joy. I know it existed in the midst of all of that hardship. It had to. I feel the need to rewrite the narrative.
I came to the island knowing I had a connection. Now I felt it. “If you have one drop of Hiiu blood, they will accept you here,” I had read. Next time, I decided, I will discover that for myself. I will talk to locals. I will claim my ancestry. And I will connect with the land that shaped my people.
Literally the most joyful book I know is about the crafts of Muhu Island, right next door. Worth owning even if you never lift a needle.
https://www.amazon.com/Designs-Patterns-Muhu-Island-Needlework/dp/B0058M82S2
Trustworthy review by a PhD with a passion for knitting.
https://kddandco.com/2012/01/12/from-muhu-island/
Wow! What an amazing tour and tale! Thank you for this gift! I’m glad your children could be with you and for how helpful it was to you and that there’s a future acceptance speculated!! 🥰