Finland-Swedes in Michigan by Mika RoinilaSwedes in Michigan by Rebecca J. Mead (review)

Book Reviews 127 Mika Roinila. Finland-Swedes in Michigan. Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012. Pp. 105. Appendices. Charts. For further reference. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Paper, $12.95. Rebecca J. Mead. Swedes in Michigan. Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012. Pp. 116. Appendices. For further reference. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Paper, $12.95. Mika Roinila’s book, Finland-Swedes in Michigan, examines FinlandSwede migration and settlement in the United States and, in particular, in Michigan. This ethnolinguistic group is a minority within a minority. Finland-Swedes speak Swedish as their mother tongue but were born in Finland. Roinila’s main goal is to identify where Finland-Swedes settled. His supporting charts provide the best available estimates as well as statistics on Michigan population centers, towns, and counties where Finland-Swedes lived between 1864 and 1930. Roinila acknowledges the imperfections of these data. He explains the challenges of census data that collected information about a person’s place of birth but not his or her mother tongue. For that reason, Swedish-speaking Finns are difficult to identify in population data, and scholars must painstakingly hand cull data. Among various sources, Roinila uses the IPUMS-USA database (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series) at the Minnesota Population Center although he acknowledges the small sample (1 percent) represented therein. In 1910 Finland-Swedes comprised only about 12.8 percent of all Finnish-born immigrants in the United States. As reported in the 1910 census, Michigan attracted the most Swedish-speaking Finns (18 percent of the 16,135 total in the United States), followed by New York (13 percent) and Oregon (12.4 percent). Despite the data uncertainties, Roinila provides county-by-county population records up to the 1930 federal census. An updated narrative would be useful now that the 1940 census is available online, and future scholars may be able to build on Roinila’s foundation. Immigration-history students might also find Roinila’s work more helpful if the narrative were more linear. Often the narrative jumps from decade to decade, forward and back, region by region, state by state, and throughout Michigan. Although Roinila provides a chart of population by county and town, there is no corresponding time line tracing these immigrants’ efforts to found churches, create temperance societies, and navigate the shifting labor supply in mining, lumbering, fishing, and other trades. When statistical accounts turn out to be imprecise, it is 128 The Michigan Historical Review anecdotal evidence, however scanty, that enlivens the record and prompts a student to explore deeper understandings of immigrant life. Roinila focuses on the church as the principal center for the cultural life these immigrants experienced. It is noteworthy that Finland-Swedes were pioneers in establishing Methodist, Baptist, Covenant, and Lutheran churches in Michigan. Yet according to Roinila the big wave of Finland-Swede immigrants (1864-1913) was not educated. What about their confirmation-class experiences in Finland’s rural parishes? What about their children’s experiences in Michigan schools? The book is silent on schooling. Roinila draws upon a wide range of sources and includes some interviews made in 2010 with Finland-Swede descendants. The third and fourth generations have little knowledge of the Swedish language and thus have lost this connection to their ancestors. One Swedish-Finn said in 2010 that he cannot even distinguish between Finnish and Swedish names (p. 68). In each of the books under review, there are appendices pertaining to culture and food. Roinila includes some traditional recipes, such as Jansson’s Temptation, and a Christmas memory of preparing lutefisk from modern sources. It is curious how the recipe title for hash, kött peruna, shows a mixing of the Finnish and Swedish languages by using the Swedish word for meat (kött) and the Finnish word for potato (peruna) in the same phrase. (p. 77). These recipe and cultural-tradition appendices can offer a link to a family’s ethnic heritage when food is all that remains connecting them to their history. Rebecca J. Mead’s Swedes in Michigan is an excellent introduction to the Swedish community in Michigan and offers a valuable overview of the historical literature on Swedes in the United States. She includes useful vignettes such as a...