Canadian Finns Genealogy

Immigrant history and genealogy

  • Eldon Oja: From Finland to Nolalu

    From the author’s preface to this 2020 publication: From Finland to Nolalu The Making of Me and You (pdf version) provides the historical ancestry for the Oja and Jacobson families coupled with the history of Finland that led to their emigration to Canada. In Canada they established homesteads in Nolalu, Ontario just southwest of Thunder…

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  • Eldon Oja: Who Were the Fort William Finns

    This new work by Eldon Oja continues the story of his family after settling in FortWilliam. It combines personal reminiscing with local history writing, andgenealogical research covering the entire Finnish population in the target area. Inthis sense, it follows the tradition started by Salomon Ilmonen a hundred yearsago in his books on the history of…

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  • The House that Herman Built

    In my mother’s album there was a black and white photo of a house, about 5×7 cm, with more than a dozen people on the front terrace and balcony. Under the photo she had written “Herman’s house in Port Arthur”. When I started to find out about my relatives who had emigrated to Canada and…

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  • The Maki Clans of Thunder Bay

    There are several families with multiple Finnish immigrants who took the surname Maki in Thunder Bay District. Often they were siblings, but in some case also cousins from the same area in Finland. In this article I present four such “clans” that appeared more than 100 years ago, and still carry the surname in Canada….

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  • Canadian Finns Genealogy

    The writings on this site are based on the study of Finnish immigrants in Canada. It began, of course, with my own relatives and continued with a few local collaborators in investigating the Finnish heritage of the residents of Nolalu, Thunder Bay. As I became familiar with the source materials in that context, I couldn’t…

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