Finnish parish records online

I thought some of you might be interested in some tips on how to search for Finnish parish records in the online HisKi database mentioned in my previous post "Finnish genealogy database on the web". Here's some step by step instructions to help you out.

1. Go to the HisKi site in http://hiski.genealogia.fi?en

2. Let's say we are looking for birth records of an ancestor who we suscpect to have born in some of the parishes of "Uusimaa" region. So we click the number 1 on the map.

3. The parishes of "Uusimaa" region are shown on the lefside listing. As we don't know exactly in which parish the person was born we click the "All" button.

4. We are looking for a birth record so we select the "Christened" link

5. We know the surname of the person that is "Koivu" so we fill that in into the father section in the surname field.

6. If we know which range of years we are approximately looking for we can set year limits in the Years field. In this case we set the lower limit to 1800.

7. Click "Submit"

8. Results are displayed but if we scroll at the bottom of the page we notice that 28 records total was found and only 23 is shown on the page because in Mäntsälä region there was more than 15 records which was the maximum number of results for one parish on a single page.


9. We go back to the top of the page and click Continue button below Mäntsälä's results.

10. We notice our person at the second last row, the column Child contains the names of the person we are actually looking for: Hjalmar Valentin. We can see from the record that his father's and mother's names and names of the village and farm where he was born. Also his mothers age, 25, has been recorded and the abbreviation of his father's title "Muon." (farmhand, farm labourer).