In the mid-1840s, a Finnish ship ran aground on the Pacific Coast and stranded its crew thousands of miles from home. But several of the sailors made the best of their mishap, permanently settling in the territory that was to become the state of Oregon. Such was the unlikely beginning of a diaspora that, in time, sent more than 300,000 people to the United States from Finland, including more than 1,000 in Coos County alone.

Some 170 years later, a tall man with thinning blond hair sat at a microfilm machine at the North Bend Public Library, carefully scanning newspaper stories from 1915 and taking down all the Swedish- or Finnish-sounding names he could find. Seemingly a typical library visitor, he was, in fact, a Finnish visitor, a writer slowly uncovering his country's almost forgotten links to the Bay Area.

In the first week of May, Karl-Gustav Olin arrived in the Bay Area to pore through decades-old newspaper clippings and interview Finnish-American families now in their third and fourth generations. His research over two weeks in Oregon and Washington will supply the material for a planned book exploring the experience of Finns, especially the country's ethnic Swedes, in the Pacific Northwest: the latest in a series of 11 books the former journalist has penned about the lives of Swede-Finns abroad.

Olin's previous books have traced the history of Finnish and Swedish emigration, beginning with the Swedes' earliest New World colony, established in 1638 in the future Delaware. As he turned his attention to immigrant outposts in places as diverse as South Africa, Alaska and the Caribbean island of St. Bart's, he found each new book inspired the next - eventually leading him to Oregon.

"When I work on a project," said the 48-year-old said in his fluent, rapid-fire English, "I find interesting material which I put to work on another project."

Despite Coos County's small population, Olin found it a fertile area for his research, gleaning numerous Swedish-Finnish names from old books and papers and interviewing at least 10 families descended from immigrants. The picture painted by the information, he said, is that of a vibrant ethnic community, once the county's largest foreign-born group, that left its mark on the South Coast's timber, fishing and agricultural fields.

Economic opportunity in the New World combined with overcrowding and political turmoil at home to launch the Finnish exodus, according to Olin.

Advances in agriculture and public health allowed the Finnish birthrate to swell, leaving farms unable to support ever-growing families and leading some to seek their fortunes abroad. And as the logging and fishing industries thrived at the turn of the 20th century and provided Scandinavians with the carrot of jobs, Finns also sought to flee the stick of authoritarian rule by tsarist Russia, which aggressively drafted men from its then-colony into its army. (Finland did not win its independence until 1910.)

Becoming a lumberjack or fisherman often was the first step for newcomers to the Northwest who spoke no English, Olin said. Arriving at first mostly as single men - the author grinned as he produced long-ago classified advertisements from "America widows," Finnish wives searching for news of their husbands working overseas - the newcomers eventually arrived as families and even whole sections of villages. The Bay Area itself became the new home for many natives of Kokkola (known to ethnic Swedes as Gamlakarleby), to the point, according to Olin, it became known as "Little Kokkola."

While the author's plans include a name list of Finnish natives who moved to the Pacific Northwest, he emphasized his will be a human history rather than a sociological one, drawing mainly on the troves of information in the memories and stories of immigrants' grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

"I don't use graphs or statistics, anything like that," Olin said.

A typical story is the one shared by the wife of a grandson of Eric Enquist, a Swede-Finn who, as a 16-year-old, was enjoying a Midsummer Day swim in the village stream when a girl in a white dress strode by, dipping her bare feet into the water. He playfully splashed the girl and they smiled at each other - not to see each other again until seven years later, "at a Lutheran Church in Salt Lake City, of all places," Olin said, grinning.

Enquist soon realized the stranger was the same girl he met in their hometown, and they married soon afterward. They settled in the Cascade Locks, where he prospered as a fisherman collecting his catch with fish wheels set in the river.

Olin envisioned a book that brings to life the full range of the Finnish community's creations, including fisheries, farms along the Coos River, the Central Dock - even a social life that once supported two Finnish-American societies, the Star of Suomi and Order of Runeberg, that operated a temperance association, mutual-aid insurance company and the Suomi Hall (named for the Finnish-language term for Finland).

For members of the Brunell family, one of the 10 that Olin interviewed during his visit, the author's visit was a pleasant revival of ties to the old country that have not broken even over four generations.

"I'm proud of my heritage, proud to be a Swede-Finn," said Anna Brands, whose grandfather, Alfred Brunell, emigrated from Gamlakarleby/Kokkola in 1907 and founded the family farm that later became the nucleus of Brookmead Dairy and that now raises beef cattle. The Brunells continue to have more members of their extended family in Finland than the U.S., she added, and it was Olin's contact with some of those relatives that led to his interviewing her and her mother, Jeanette Brunell.

Even more illuminating - to Brands as well as Olin - was the writer's interview of another Swede-Finn descendant, Ruth Shutter, now 90.

"Ruth was friends with my grandparents, none of whom lived to be 60," she said. "She was so knowledgeable about the Swede-Finns in the community, so it was special to listen to her stories."

While immigrants and their children adopted the English language as their own and severed their linguistic ties to the home country, the popularity of English as the lingua franca of much of Europe actually makes it easier than before for immigrants' families to track their relatives across the Atlantic, and vice versa.

"We speak English much more than the old generation did," said Olin, "and now we can communicate again."

Though time and the absorption of Finnish emigrants into American society have effaced much of their ethnic identity, modern-day Finns remain interested in the lives of their former countrymen and their descendants, Olin declared.

"Everybody has somebody (in the family) who emigrated," he said. "It's a piece of family history in another part of the world."