Noteworthy About the Maukonens
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How this Activity All
Started
by Bret
Maukonen
During the summer of 1993, I was on the bridge of the passenger ship "Canadian Empress" waiting to depart Montreal on our upbound trip to Kingston, Ontario. The head office of St. Lawrence Cruise Lines had been good about sending maritime journals and newsletters for the attention of officers. I was reading one called the "Great Lakes Log" and on the back page saw "Maukonen" in the obituary section. It literally took my breath away. We're such a small family and I did not expect to see our family name in an American publication. But there it was ... Arne E. Maukonen of Conneaut, Ohio had passed away. I shared the information with my immediate family and planned some day to contact the Maukonens in Conneaut.
My wife and I had been invited by one of the passengers who lived in Cleveland to attend a Cleveland Indians - Toronto Blue Jays game. We drove from our home in Port Colborne (on the north shore of Lake Erie) across the Peace Bridge in Buffalo, New York and followed the south shore of Lake Erie westward. When we arrived in Conneaut, I looked up the Maukonen name in the phone book. My first call was to Jane (and Darrell) Maukonen who suggested that I contact Gertrude (Waino Maukonen’s wife). We stopped by her place with the intention of leaving a note but were delighted to meet her and to spend about an hour in conversation. We had to continue our trip to Cleveland but that meeting would become part of an ongoing contact and an expanding awareness of the Maukonen family clusters.
In the closing years of this decade and
century, Maukonens are discovering and
rediscovering one another. When I had
been travelling on the Great Lakes and
during my two trips to Finland, I
failed
to find any Maukonens in what seemed to
be the obvious places. But, by a
fortunate "happenstance" and a variety
of contacts and searches, we had the
means of contacting "lost" family
members and others who share our
heritage as Maukonens.
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