The Gripenberg
Family Association
webmaster: Martin Gripenberg
The Gripenberg Family Association, formed in 1952, worked as an informal association until it was registered as a formal one on 5 October 2007 with Lennart Gripenberg as chairman.
The registration means that the association will have an annual meeting before the end of May, has established statutes, a board chosen at the annual meeting, an economy approved by the members and an annual plan of action.
Members of the association may be of either gender. A person may become a member of the association even if he is not mentioned in the Finnish Peerage but are a descendant of a family member, have a connection to the family through marriage or adoption or simply have general interest in the family.
According to the statutes the association is based in Helsinki and the language used by the association is Swedish.
The continuation of the association is dependent on the membership fee. The fee is €10 per year. Paying the membership fee is the most reliable way to get information about the activities of the association. Furthermore, the redirect email address (surname)@gripenberg.fi is available to members for €5 per year.
Why a family association?
In our modern and individualistic time a family association provides the opportunity to keep in contact with more distant relatives as well as one’s roots. According to the statues of the association the objective of the association is to safeguard and develop the feeling of affinity in the Gripenberg family. In order to complete this objective, different meetings, gatherings, and excursions are organised.
The philosof and historian Avishai Margalit discuss in his book Ethics of Memory the nature of the collective memory of the society and to which extent it is important to remember events and persons from past times. According to him the collective memory is a central force in keeping the society together. Those thick relationships bind us to family members, our clan, our suburban society and finally to the nation. Without a history and memories there is not even a society. Forgetting or wrong memories may harm these relations: to be omitted from the collective memory is one of the worst ways to be excluded from society.
There are many families that have not seen any need of a family association, but there are also family associations with tousands of members, an own regular publication etc.
The idea of the individual freedom formulated in the manifest by the Swedish sociaIdemocratic women in 1972 concern that all adult people should be economically independent of family members, particularily women of their husband, has according to the Swedish-Italian film Director Erik Grandini got to extremes in the modern Nordic society because the loneliness has become a problem in as far as we have created a cold society, where the individual is isolated, grows up alone, divorces, lacks contact to the children if there are any, and dies alone. In his film The Swedish Theory of Love he is criticizing the lack of solidarity with family members and the society, which according to him has become an antithesis to a society where the head of the clan is deciding the life of all family members.
The more successful members of the Gripenberg family, however have consequently shown solidarity to the family and the society, without restricting the life of the other individuals of the family.
Please read also about Oscar Gripenberg and Julian Bielski’s letter and presentation of Vladimir Gripenberg’s Moskow and the Russian branch of the family.