Obtaining an extract of parish register

It is possible to obtain extracts from parish registers for genealogical study directly from the local parishes in Finland. Parish register extracts are usually available from 1850 until nowadays, so they are a good place to start your genealogy research as it is sufficient to know your grandparents name, place of living and birthdate. Before 1850 the parish records are in church archives which can then be accessed through HisKi database online. See my previous posting about how to use Hiski.



So, the first thing to do is to find out the first name, surname and birthdate of the ancestor you are looking for. Then you need to look for the web pages of the parish. Luckily most of the parishes nowadays have some kind of web pages online. Best way is to google name of the place/city together with the word "seurakunta", which means parish in finnish, and then search for page for contacts ("yhteystiedot"). For example "Vaasa seurakunta". There you can look for an contact email address and send a request of an extract from the parish register by email.

Some parishes also have ready made web forms that you can just fill in to do the request (for example Turku and Helsinki). It is good also to request the receiver to forward the email to person responsible of parish register extracts in case you happen to contact the wrong person.

In your request you must also mention what do you want to have marked on the extract. This could be for example the names, birth dates and places of the parents of the person for whom you are requesting the extract for. You must also state that the reason for the request is family research.

Parish register extracts cost usually something between 5 and 25 euros, this varies depending on the parish and the work needed to find the requested information. Payment options for foreigners ofcourse vary also depending on the parish in question.

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).

General parish registers

General parish registers are registers maintained by local parishes in Finland. They are the foundation for any genealogist doing genealogical research in Finland. Parishes were forced by law to keep the general parish records in 1668 and this is why some parishes have solid records from that year until today.



In different phases of history these registers have contained slightly varying set of information, but the core has remained the same. Earliest general parish register contain mostly lists of parish member names in their swedish format and possibly some notes about their bible reading skills.

Since the beginning of 18th century the records became more detailed containing also dates of birth, mariages, parish member relocations, illnesses and the time of death. During 19th century records may contain also marks about vaccinations, crimes, military service and basicly any miscellaneous notes that the priest wanted to record.