Military records

Finnish military records are mostly located in two archives: in the War Archive and in the National Archive. Some of the archive material is accessible on internet too.

National Archive's Militaria Collection contains documents on military personel from 18th century until the beginning of the Finnish autonomy period (approximately 1812). Military records of the National Archive are available also in provincial archives as microfilms.

The other archive containing finnish military records is War Archive. It was created on 1918 and contains archive material beginning from the year 1812 until nowadays. Most of the material is produced by the Ministry of Defence, Defence Forces and the National Border Guard, but in addition it contains material from donated and purchased private collections.

War archive also maintains a database of the fallen Finnish soldiers during the second world war (1939-1945). The database can be freely accessed on the internet in http://kronos.narc.fi/menehtyneet/ This database contains over 95 000 persons that can be searched by surname, first name, date of birth or death, home town, etc.

National Archive

Finland's National Archive contains around fourty shelf kilometer of documents. The oldest document are from the middle-ages. The oldest document from 1316 is King Birger's protection letter to the women of Karelia. Oldest whole document series are tax records which date back to the end of 1530's.

Documents from the Swedish reign are accounting records, court records and land maps. Most important sources from the autonomy era are senate archives, state secretary archives and general governor chamber's large archives.

National archive receives all the documents to be saved permanently for 40 years state from government and local institutions. Approximately 15-20% of the official documents are permanently stored.

National archive also receives private archives as donations or savings. Private archives contain archives of statesmen, politicians, culture persons as well as archives of various communities.

Most used archives be genealogist are general achive of population ("asutuksen yleisluettelo") and copies of parish records. In addition National Archive contains microfilm copies of documents stored in provincial archives, church archives and foreign archives.

Archives of Finnish evangelist-lutheran parishes which are older than 100 years are saved in National Archives as microfilms and they can be used by genealogists.

In addition National archive contains a large amount of maps and drawings, oldest dating back to seventeenth century.