Invisible Histories

“Greener Grass” is an 18-minute video exploring immigration from Finland to America, as well as touching upon the larger issues and questions involved in immigration in general. Some of those addressed include:

And what can we learn?

Due to economic necessity, the majority of those immigrating from Finland to America did so roughly around the turn of the century; two sets of my great-grandparents did so in the late 1890s.

If nothing else, please see Finland DNA Project member Dan Karvonen’s comments starting at about 13:53 in the video. Echoing what another interviewee said earlier on, “all of us are immigrants.” This is a critical point that we here in America either too easily forget or ignore.

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Friend and Finland Project member Marja reminds me of a critical point left out of my original post on the Great Petition and that is how profoundly moving it can be to find your relative’s signature.

For those of us involved in family history research, much of the time we are dealing with dates and numbers on dry documents – records of birth, death, marriages, moves, passenger manifests, census records, etc. All extraordinarily valuable in building up a story of the individual and of the family but still it is a record of, not by. And photos from this era (the 1890s) are, although wonderful to have, more often than not formally posed, our ancestors stiff and sombre-faced, telling us little about their actual lives.

But in the case of the Great Petition we have something much more than the typical genealogy resource. Here we see the signatures of our relatives themselves, participating in a historic moment as they protest en masse the Russification of their country. For Marja, it wasn’t just finding the signature of her relatives but it was also how “painstakingly carefully they signed the petition!”

Mélart, Mäntsälä parish, Great Petition of 1899

This page is from the parish of Mäntsälä, Uudenmaa district, and shows her relatives Oskari, Antti, Alma and Claus Mélart. [Kiitos, Marja!]

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Via the Finlander Forum and Ilmari Kivinen, word that Finland’s National Archives has scanned and uploaded for viewing signature pages from the Great Petition of 1899. The petition includes signatures from over 500,000 people, taken during March of 1899 to protest Russian czar Nicholai II’s February declaration of his sole right to rule over Finland.

The archive is searchable for relatives’ signatures first by province, then by parish. An amazing resource.

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