Finns in the Sugar Island Networks

Post by: Saara Kekki As present-day islanders will tell us, Frank Aaltonen was one of the first Finns on the island and quickly rose to prominence (see also Rani Andersson’s post on Aaltonen’s politics and Justin Gage’s on land ownership). Our research supports this view, especially when it comes to the variety of positions he …

Frank Aaltonen, Oskari Tokoi, and Native Americans

(Blog adapted from Socialist Visions of American Dreams: The Finnish Settler Lives of Oskari Tokoi and Frank Aaltonen by Rani-Henrik Andersson & Rainer Smedman in Finnish Settler Colonialism in North America: Rethinking Finnish Experiences in Transnational Spaces Rani-Henrik Andersson, Janne Lahti (eds.)   In the summer of 1921, two Finnish immigrants met on the streets …

PI’s Blog 2021-2022

The Humana project has been going on now for about four years and is gradually winding down. While this has been exciting research it has also posed us some challenges. Especially difficult was the period of COVID-19 pandemic. We could not, for example, conduct field work and archival research in Sugar Island and Hancock, Michigan …

Finns and the Land

Author: Justin Gage We are ready to publish our first visualization! This is a preliminary or “beta” version mapping Finnish property ownership on Sugar Island in 1938. Most land records from the 19th and early 20th centuries are not particularly detailed. If the land is west of Ohio, it was surveyed in accordance with the …