This is the first post of three in series called Changing Sugar Island: A Study of Twentieth-Century Finnish American Settlement. Look for the next two posts in the menu above. One of the goals of the HUMANA Project is to understand the social, economic, and political impact Finnish-born migrants had on Sugar Island, Michigan once …
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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 …
PI’s Blog 2020
Since my last blog post the HUMANA project has progressed very nicely, even though COVID-19 pandemic forced us to cancel our research trips to Sugar Island both in the spring and fall 2020. So that obviously has caused some practical problems, but we were really looking forward to meeting our Sugar Island friends again. On …
Research Trip to Sugar Island
What can tax records, clerk account books, property inventories, and voter registration records of a rural Michigan township tell us about human migration? Thanks to those who made efforts to preserve and restore the records of the Sugar Island township, we can learn a lot. A few months ago, I visited Sugar Island and Sault …