From March until June 2025, an exhibit “To Estonia, With Love: An Intergenerational Travelogue” was displayed at VEMU, in Toronto. It was the story of three generations of Estonian-Canadian women— Helen Rammo (née Haljaste), Marina Intson (née Rammo), and Camille Intson—tracing their ancestors’ footsteps from Estonia to Canada and back again in the aftermath of the 1940-1991 Soviet occupation.
This story begins with the personal archive and records of Helen Rammo (Haljaste), a celebrated Estonian colonel’s daughter born in 1921 in Nõmme before escaping Estonia in 1942 and resettling permanently in Canada in 1949. Following her death in 2013, Helen’s daughter and granddaughter Marina and Camille found themselves in possession of boxes of photographs, scrapbooks, documents, and other priceless ephemera from the interwar period in Estonia onward. In the decade following, they would return to these records as a guide and road map to piece together forgotten parts of family history, hoping to one day visit each of the places meticulously documented in Helen’s scrapbooks. In the summer of 2024, this dream was finally realized as Marina and Camille visited Estonia for the first time to embark on a cross-country road trip, retracing their family’s movements and re-creating Helen’s old photographs from the archive. This exhibit is the story of that journey.
The first section of this exhibit documents Marina and Camille’s road trip through Estonia, reflecting on the familial research and documentation processes that bridge Helen’s archive with the present day. The second section features mixed media collages and photographs created by mother and daughter, giving viewers added insight into the process of archival interpretation and into the resilient intergenerational maternal bond at the backbone of this project. In collaboration with VEMU Estonian Museum of Canada, this project emphasizes the gendered labour of memory work and the importance of intergenerational connection and communication to the Estonian-Canadian diaspora.
For Estonian Music Week, the VEMU team put together an exhibit “Play me that old tune: LPs from VEMU Collections”. As of spring 2025, VEMU’s collection includes 1300 vinyl records. This exhibition showcases a small sampling of the diaspora Estonian records which can be found in VEMU’s collection.
There have been no complete overviews of diaspora Estonian records published to date. Swedish-Estonian Reno Sepp compiled a list titled “Estonian Sound In the West,” which was the basis for Gea Talts’ bachelor’s thesis “Estonian Vinyl Records in Exile 1945-1991,” which she defended at Tallinn University in 2003. Unfortunately, neither of these are exhaustive. Historian Maarja Merivoo-Parro and musician Vaiko Eplik have researched and popularized diaspora Estonian pop music, producing a CD in 2015 titled “ESTO music: Diaspora-Estonian Pop Records 1958 1988.” Thanks to this, we now regularly hear diaspora Estonian pop music on Estonian radio stations.
There are also other diaspora Estonian music enthusiasts in Estonia. A melomaniac from Viljandi, Andres Karrol, owns one of the largest collections – about 270 vinyl records. In collaboration with the Library of the University of Tartu, he organized the world’s largest diaspora Estonian record exhibition, as part of the 10th Psühhodisko conference in fall of 2024.
Talts’ data shows that diaspora Estonians produced over 300 vinyl records (that doesn’t include recordings by Eduard Tubin, Arvo Pärt, and Neeme Järvi), but according to former VEMU record collection archivist Rutt Veskimets, many of the records found in VEMU’s archives are missing from Talts’ discography. It is very necessary to compile a new diaspora Estonian discography, which should include VEMU’s record collection and those records that have made their way from Toronto to Estonian memory institutions in the past 15 years. As of spring 2025, VEMU’s collection includes 1300 vinyl records, about half of which are not of diaspora Estonian origin. 409 have been confirmed to be of diaspora Estonian origin. It is risky to state whether the rest of them are diaspora Estonian without further, more thorough research.
Diaspora Estonian records spanned many genres: folk to classical, jazz, pop, and rock. There were those who preserved traditions as well as modernists, there were amateurs and professionals. But one thing is for sure: music plays an important role in the lives of Estonians. Through music, we have become and stayed as one nation and gathered notoriety in the world.
This exhibition includes only a small sampling of the diaspora Estonian records which can be found in VEMU’s collection. If you want to discover more of our collection, visit us or search our database.