Invisible Histories

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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Long a home to Native Americans (particularly the Algonquin), in the 1800s and first part of the 1900s and largely due to its mining, timber and available land Michigan became a magnet for those immigrating to America, including a large number from Finland. For some it functioned as a brief stopover before they moved on to other parts of the US, while some have stayed in Michigan since the arrival of their family’s first immigrants.

Seeking Michigan is a searchable website with the following, constantly growing collections:  Architecture, Civil War (manuscripts, photography and service records), Death Records 1897-1920, Early Photography, Governors of Michigan, Lighthouses and Life-Saving Stations, Maps, Main Streets, Music of Michigan, Oral Histories and WPA Property Inventories.

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