Ticket includes: Lunch and coffee.
Finnish American family history is an American History with its own unique geography and culture not necessarily learned while growing up. Join others interested in a day devoted to thinking about Finnish America’s family history.
Learn ways to explore and define the diverse stories that make up these histories. This all-day workshop will move beyond the DNA components in a person’s identity to emphasize instead the multi-generational experiences that make up our identities, experiences often uncovered only if a person starts to pursue family history.
Details:
9:00 Welcome and introduction
9:15 Finding your roots without the help of the PBS show or Ancestry.com:
using an object, a food, a place, a story, to start your “where do I come from?”
Presenter: James Johnson, Author
10:00 Break
10:15 Gathering materials: Interviewing people, Visiting Sites, Looking at family movies and photo albums, Family reunions.
Panel discussion: James Johnson, Marianne Wargelin, Barb Wilson, the Audience
11:00 Moving the research from your home to Finnish American family History Resources in Public Access: Libraries, museums, and archives across the USA.
Presenter: K. Marianne Wargelin, Public Historian
12:00 Break and Lunch
1:00 Attendees will choose one of two afternoon workshops, each limited to 20 participants:
1. Writing your family history or memoir
2. Using HisKi (Database of the Genealogical Society of Finland)
4:00 Conclusion
Writing your family history or memoir
Jim Johnson, Instructor
Beginning, Beginning Again, and Again:
Although people can join a writers’ group, few writers’ groups exist specifically to write family history or memoir. The afternoon will be spent doing a series of writing exercises that will help each participant get started with their own projects. How to use forms to put the narrative together. How to make it honest. How to handle uncomfortable data’ How to incorporate maps and photos. How to use personal interviews. In other words: how to make it more than dates and names, becoming, instead, something that people will enjoy reading and sharing with family and friends.
Limited to 20 people.
HisKi Workshop: Tools for researching ancestors in Finland.
Barb Wilson, Instructor
Online family trees are widely available, but the information found in them is not necessarily accurate and is often limited. This workshop will have two parts, both focusing on tools attendees can use to do their own genealogical research in the Finnish records.
• Introduction to Finnish first and last names: This session will explain how Finnish last
names changed in Finland during a person’s lifetime, as well as how immigrant names
changed in America.
• Introduction to HisKi, a free Finnish online genealogical database: HisKi is a good place to begin looking for information found in the Finnish parish records. The database includes more of these records than other searchable databases, and it offers instructions and
result labels in English.
Attendees at this workshop are encouraged to bring a computer as well as any information they already have about their immigrant ancestors. They can use this information to start a search on HisKi during this session.
Biographies of the speakers:
Barb Wilson is the current President of the Finnish Genealogy Group of Minnesota. After retirement, Barb brought her professional skills as a researcher to genealogy. She traced her family history in Finland using Finnish genealogical records, both online and in the National Archives of Finland. She has shared what she learned during this process, giving multiple presentations, including presentations at several previous FinnFests. In 2014, Barb won the Minnesota Genealogical Society’s Family History Writing Award for an article documenting her Finnish great grandmother’s life. She currently edits the English language version of a Finnish blog on researching roots in Finland.
James Johnson, a career writing teacher (Duluth public schools and the College of St. Scholastica) and poet, has published 12 books of poetry. He specializes in the use of local culture, the natural environment and family history as a source for writing and teaches classes to help people find and use their own histories as a source. Jim’s own writing almost totally comes out of his use of Finnish American history, including his own family history in Montana (father’s side) and Cloquet, Minnesota (mother’s side.) He started writing poetry as a way to bring Finnish America’s history back to life and meaning.
K. Marianne Wargelin has broad and deep personal knowledge of Finnish American communities. She grew up in three: Berkeley, CA, Fairport Harbor, OH, and Hancock, MI and spent considerable time with her grandparents who lived in Waukegan, Il. Her father’s work took the family to Finnish communities across the country, giving her further experiences with Finnish America. She became a college professor teaching cultural history and a researcher specializing in Finnish America seen in the context of the US and Northern Europe. As part of a project entitled “1983: the Year of the Finnish American Archives,” she became acquainted with the many small archival collections across the USA. She is the author of three encyclopedia articles and has published essays in journals and books.