The Icelandic Roots 2026 Focus

by Rob Olason

The Icelandic Roots 2026 focus is “Exploring and Documenting Local Icelandic Settlements in North America.” In 2025, the focus was on Icelandic art and culture in Iceland and North America. 2024 saw us focusing on the Settlement Era of Iceland around the first millennium. We inaugurated the idea of focusing on a specific topic in 2023 when we explored Icelandic emigration to North America and other continents.

The idea of examining a focus topic each year doesn’t exclude any other topic of interest; it simply encourages our writers, editors, webinar, podcast, seminar, book club and conversation hour producers to find presenters who can help inform members on the selected topics.

Over the course of the year, you will have the opportunity for a more in-depth look at the topic. However, we will continue bringing you stories and educational opportunities on any and all Icelandic-related subjects. For example, in January, the public webinar explores the night sky of the Viking era with the eminent Icelandic folklore scholar, Professor Gísli Sigurdsson. The book club discussed the excellent novel by contemporary Icelandic writer Jón Kalman Stefánsson, Your Absence is Darkness, and the first Samtal Hour of 2026 was a conversation about the 2025 Icelandic Roots offerings that members enjoyed and the topics they would like to see in the future. (Don’t be surprised if we learn a thing or two about Icelandic horses in 2026!)

Upcoming Icelandic Roots offerings are already weaving in opportunities that touch on the 2026 focus.

The January Roots Tips topic is “Researching the history of your local Icelandic community,” presented by Willie Engelson, who has spent years exploring his family’s Icelandic community on Washington Island, Wisconsin.

In February, the Book Club will meet to discuss Laura Goodman Salverson’s “Confessions of an Immigrant’s Daughter.” The work offers a first-hand account of living in and adapting to a new land, new culture, new language. This story won Canada’s Governor General’s Award in 1939. The memoir offers an intimate, nuanced portrait of the life and struggles all immigrants face, from a very Icelandic point of view. The story explores her family's early days in Winnipeg, but then begins to shift to other locations as her father continued to search for a better future for his family.

Visitors from Iceland posing at the Memorial at Willow Island near Gimli, MB .

That search from community to community for a better future played out across many North American communities. A frequent feature of many family stories is a recitation of the multiple moves across the continent to find that perfect home.

On the Icelandic Roots website, the page Icelandic Roots | Emigration-Immigration gives a capsule review of why Icelanders left Iceland and where they settled. This page is at the heart of our 2026 focus, and throughout the year, our Icelandic Roots activities and presentations will be returning to the details that are on this page. We will also be searching for the missing details that should be on this page. This is where our readers and members can join in this year-long project.

As an Icelandic descendant, is your family’s settlement community listed on this page?

Can you share what you know about your family’s settlement journey, all the temporary and permanent communities they called home?

Do you know some of the history of those settlements?

Do you know of some of the prominent members of the community?

Or some of the “characters” in the community?

Do Icelandic descendants still live there? Does the community still exist?

For all of us, whether Icelandic descendants or Icelandic interested, how much of this story do we know?

What else can we find out about this story?

Icelandic Roots is on a year-long voyage of discovery, where the goal is to recover the Icelandic diaspora’s forgotten history, collect those discoveries, and share them with the Icelandic Roots community and the world-at-large through our articles, events, podcasts, and special activities.

We’ve already laid out a month-by-month “wish list” of areas to explore:

January- Why They Left, Arrival Ports

February-Utah and Brazil settlements

March-Wisconsin settlements-Washington Island, Shawano, Milwaukee

April- Muskoka/Kinmount, Ontario; Markland, Nova Scotia

May- Minneota/Lyon County, Minnesota

June- Lake Winnipeg area, Manitoba

July- North Dakota

August- Lake Manitoba area, Manitoba

September- Saskatchewan

October- Alberta

November- British Columbia

December- Washington

Do these locations encompass all the settlement areas? No, they do not. We need your help in locating those missing communities. And sharing what you know about those communities.

To help you help us tell the story of your family’s settlement community, we’ve set up a hotline where you can share your tips to help us find the communities we’ve missed.

Send tips to outreach@icelandicroots.com.

With your assistance in this effort, all leads will be followed. We’ll make sure no community is forgotten.