Juntunen descendants everywhere are asking questions about their roots. Who are we as a family group? Individually, where did we come from?

Your life will be enriched as you learn the facts and stories of your Juntunen family's history. You will develop a renewed sense of pride in your Finnish ethnicity. Perhaps you will create new friendships and have reunions with long-lost relatives. You might even find a new reason to travel in the US or Europe, particularly within Finland. The pursuit of family mysteries can be a lot of fun and recreation.

The good news is that if you are inquisitive about your Juntunen roots and do not mind doing some investigation, there are many available resources and records that can help you participate in this project.

As you seek to recover your family's history and heritage, many important facts and information will come to light and become available for sharing with other family members. And often your family's data will need to be located in county, church, state, and national records offices, in libraries, and from microfilmed records. A computer and use of the Internet can be invaluable tools both for searching and to help organize the information you develop. However, there is much information that can only be gained from personal interviews or letters to family members, activities that certainly do not need a computer.

As you consider how to begin researching your Juntunen ancestors, consider the following:

• What are your personal goals for genealogy research?
• What do you already know about your family?
• How much information do you really want to obtain?
• Are your goals realistic and attainable? Do they go from short-term to long term?
• Are you willing to do the work necessary to document your family's data using generally acceptable methods and sources?
• Realize that not everyone in your family or among your friends will be interested in this project. That is OK. See the tips below about ''How to obtain data from family members''.
• Center your goal on your own benefits resulting from the work you will do to research your ancestors.

Ultimately, we would like all the Juntunen branches in North America to submit information to the project so it can be compiled into a comprehensive book.

What are the best ways to begin Juntunen family research? The suggestions in this newsletter article will help you learn how to submit your family's data. By learning generally accepted ways to conduct your genealogy research, you and the North American Juntunen Project will greatly benefit. When you submit data collected according to the North American Juntunen Project guidelines, that data published in our future book will be considered to have a high degree of accuracy and reliability by other family members and their descendants, as well as by other researchers.

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This page was last modified on March 2, 1998