Introduction: roots and shoots

As in other parts of Finland, many North Karelian farmers are descendants of earlier farming families in the same or nearby villages. A few contemporary Vieki families, such as the Savolainens, go back in the village to at least the seventeenth century, and there are many others whose roots there can be traced to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Matti Kärkkäinen represents the eighth successive generation of his branch of the Kärkkäinens to hold his lake-shore farm since 1722, but most cases of connection between family and locality are less clear-cut than this. Farms have passed through daughters into other surname groups, and they have often simply been sold to other families. Even Matti's case is not as simple as it sounds. He owns only part of the large original ancestral farm, which has gradually been carved up into sections with a wide variety of owners, and he has himself acquired land from others. At the same time many members of the family have moved to other farms or out of Vieki altogether. Overall, approximately half of the farming and land-holding families of the village in the early nineteenth century still have direct descendants of the same surname who own, and have at least till recently, farmed land there.