Abstract
Studies on displaced persons often suffer from a lack of data on the long-term effects of forced migration. A register created during 1960s and published as a book series ‘Siirtokarjalaisten tie’ in 1970 documented the lives of individuals who fled the southern Karelian district of Finland after its first and second occupation by the Soviet Union in 1940 and 1944. To realize the potential value of these data for scientific research, we have recently scanned the register using optical character recognition (OCR) software, and developed proprietary computer code to extract these data. Here we outline the steps involved in the digitization process, and present an overview of the Migration Karelia (MiKARELIA) database now available to researchers. The digitized register contains over 160000 adults and a wide range of data on births, marriages, occupations and movements of these forced migrants, likely to be of interest to researchers across disciplines including demographers, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, historians, economists and sociologists.
Highlights
Forced migrations are fixtures of human existence: throughout human history, populations have encountered circumstances in which they have had to move due to environmental, economic, social and political factors
One interesting opportunity to study this is provided by the registers that are available on the migrants in Finland who lost their homes during the Second World War
In Finland, approximately 420,000 citizens were evacuated to southern and central Finland following the loss of Karelia to the Soviet Union
Summary
Forced migrations are fixtures of human existence: throughout human history, populations have encountered circumstances in which they have had to move due to environmental, economic, social and political factors. By digitizing the register outlined in this article, we provide a way to use a highly detailed, extensive and previously unanalyzed dataset to gain broad insights into the effects of one of the best documented forced migration events on individuals, their families and the larger population These new data complement the census data used in previous work (Sarvimäki et al, 2010; Haukka et al, 2017), and give avenues for new insight not previously possible. Number of individuals according to sex in forced migrant database based on how they appear in data (primary entry or entered as a spouse of primary) as well as number of unmarried people and number of children. We combined the information on occupation and migration events over time
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