This is the second post of three in series called Changing Sugar Island: A Study of Twentieth-Century Finnish American Settlement. Look for the other two posts in the menu above. For the second of three blog posts about Finnish American migrants to Sugar Island, Michigan and their use of the land, I will focus on …
Tag Archives: Finnish American history
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 …
The Various Chapters in the Lives of Sugar Island Finns
Writer: Olli Saukko In this post, I continue with evaluating the process of researching the background of Sugar Island Finns. As the first post presented the sources and challenges of this research, this post concentrates on some of the findings I made during the process. The peaceful, harmonious and united Finnish community? W hen …
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Where did the Sugar Island Finns come from?
Writer: Olli Saukko I worked as a project researcher in the HUMANA project on its first year, 2019. My main task, with which I spent most of my time within the project, was to examine the background of the Finnish people that lived on Sugar Island in Michigan in the time period of this research, …
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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 …