Irma Margareta Martin

Irma "Margareta" Martin, 95, passed away on December 1, 2025. Her remarkable life spanned from Finland to the USA, where she touched many lives preserving and promoting Finnish and Nordic community and culture in Atlanta and the Southeast.

Margareta, as she is known to her US friends, was born August 6, 1930 in Helsinki to Jarl Otto Casimir Carpelan and Mirja Emilia (von Zweygberg) Carpelan. Otto, a forestry engineer, raised her to love nature, including birds and forest walks. Mirja, later a national archivist, encouraged a passion for reading and family history. Younger brother, Christian Carpelan, is a retired archaeologist in Finland. Her childhood years were spent in Viipuri (now Vyborg, Russia), Jyväskylä, and Helsinki, with summers in the lake-dotted Finnish countryside. An imaginative child, she penned stories, loved learning languages, and sketched and painted under the tutelage of her dear artist aunt Brita von Zweygberg. She won local awards in orienteering and cross-country skiing. During the Continuation War, she was sent to Sweden for a year and kept a diary of that experience.

Margareta graduated Laudatur, the top commendation in high school exam scores, from Helsingin Suomalainen Yhteiskoulu, and earned a bachelor's degree in business administration at Svenska Handelshögskolan in Helsinki. Aspiring to a foreign service career, she worked as an interpreter at Galeries Lafayette department store in Paris in 1951 and at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics. Employer Wald Tefke, a Helsinki-based import firm, praised her ambition and fluency in Finnish, Swedish, French, German, and English.

Margareta's opportunity to expand her horizons came in summer 1953, when she accepted an invitation to study in the USA from her grand-uncle Lennart von Zweygberg, esteemed cellist and music professor at Indiana University-Bloomington. She made many friends among IU's vibrant community of international graduate students, studied government and comparative literature, and completed her first master's degree. In late summer 1954, she returned to Finland to work for another import firm Collichem Helsingfors. But Margareta yearned to see the world, and the chance to leave Finland permanently presented when a friend from IU, William "Bill" Culbertson Martin, arrived in March 1955. Margareta accepted Bill's proposal in Paris that summer, and they were married October 30, 1955, in Helsinki.

The happy couple returned to Bloomington for Bill and Margareta to pursue their respective graduate studies in sociology and political science. Bill's teaching took them to Fulton, Mo. (1958-1959), Indianapolis, Ind. (1959-1965), and Cedar Rapids, Iowa (1965-1968). Daughter Anya was born in 1963, and Margareta committed her creative energies to motherhood, ceramics, faculty-wife volunteer activities, and Siamese cat Pupu ("Bunny" in Finnish). From 1968-1970 in Nashville, Tenn., Bill finished his doctorate at Vanderbilt University, and Margareta earned a second master's in library science from George Peabody College (now Vanderbilt).

After a 1970 move to Atlanta, Bill taught at Georgia State University, and Margareta utilized her degree as secretary for the American Association of University Women's Reading Is Fundamental project, distributing free books to Atlanta-area schoolchildren, and as a reference librarian for Emory University's Woodruff Library. In 1975 she began a two-decade career as an information specialist at The Coca-Cola Company's Technical Information Services. In 1991 she was promoted to manager, leading TIS's transition to fully automated library systems until her 1994 retirement.

However, a chance introduction to fellow Finnish expatriate Marja Barron lit the flame of Margareta's mission for the rest of her life. The two co-founded the Atlanta Finland Society (AFS), originally a social club for Atlanta-based Finnish families, but quickly expanding to showcasing Finland in international fairs, exhibits, lectures, musical performances, films, and more. Margareta served as AFS president from 1975-1979 and in 2005. Some AFS achievements of which she was particularly proud include helping bring Eino's "The Last Meter" statue of four-time gold-medal runner Lasse Virén to Piedmont Park, serving as a local liaison with Finnish teams for the 1996 Atlanta Olympic and Paralympic Games, working with the Museum of Design Atlanta to host an exhibition on architect/designer Eero Saarinen in 2013, and collaborating with the Finnish-American Chamber of Commerce to invite Pasi Sahlberg, a key innovator behind Finland's acclaimed education system, to meet with Georgia educational leaders. She traveled often to Finland to visit family, cultivate transatlantic partnerships, and bring resources back to Atlanta. In 2013, she published The Finns of Atlanta: A History of the Atlanta Suomi Finland Society 1970-2010, exploring, in her words, how AFS "fit into Atlanta's rise into an international, multicultural city."

Starting in 1983, Margareta was active in the Scandinavian-American Foundation of Georgia, serving as president, chair, and secretary. Under her leadership, two 1990s Scandinavian Weekends brought representatives from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland to share Nordic innovation at Emory University and The Carter Center. She served as board member and cultural exhibits committee chair for the Atlanta Scandinavian Festival for more than 15 years, volunteered enthusiastically with other Atlanta-based Nordic groups, and, along with Bill, hosted many foreign professionals and students for the Atlanta Council for International Visitors, GSU, Emory, and other organizations.

Through her working years and into retirement, Margareta also performed translator and interpreter work for business and personal clients. She won the 1997 Finnish-American Translators Association (FATA) translation competition, served as FATA's chair, and saw publication of two novel translations-the critically acclaimed Voices in the Late Hour by Bo Carpelan (University of Georgia Press, 1988) and Rich and Respected by Eeva Joenpelto (FATA, 1997). She taught Finnish to American students and penned articles and book reviews for World Literature Today, New World Finn, Finnish American Reporter, Helsinki's Swedish newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet, and more.

Over Margareta's time in Atlanta, four collies Rory, Tristan, Duncan, and Max, cat Kai, and Anya's husky Curv also were dear family members. Sadly Bill passed away in 2014, but even in her 80s, Margareta remained active in AFS and Nordic organizations, as well as the Emory Women's Club. She enthusiastically engaged in knitting, crocheting, quilting, reading, various art projects, and tending to her garden where her bulbs continue to bloom every spring. Her good health seemed unstoppable until cancer in 2018. Resilient as ever, she conquered it through surgery and chemotherapy, but Alzheimer's disease followed. In June 2021, she moved to Pebblebrook at Park Springs memory care community. Margareta's family is grateful to all the amazing loving staff who became not merely caregivers but friends. Margareta's wish was a place with a garden, and many photos show her in her wheelchair "walking" Curv out among the flowers and within the cheerful corridors.

Margareta is survived by daughter Anya, as well as brother Christian Carpelan and his wife Anja; niece Anna Dye and her husband John; nephew Paulus Carpelan and his wife Maari; their three children Siina, Frida, and Joel; and her beloved cousin Laura Jalkanen-Lehtinen, her husband Risto and children Jyri and Arla.

A Celebration of Life for Margareta Martin will be held on Saturday March 28 at 1 p.m. (viewing at noon) at A. S. Turner & Sons, 2773 North Decatur Road, Decatur, GA 30033, (404) 292-1551, www.asturner.com. Following her wishes, she will be buried with her parents in Helsinki at Hietaniemi cemetery. In lieu of flowers, contributions are encouraged in Margareta's memory to the Finlandia Foundation's Making History campaign or Doctors Without Borders.