Find Finnish Ancestors

A good start place for finding your Finnish ancestors is a website called HisKi Project.

The start page I linked to above is in English, something many of us really need.

Keep in mind that the information is transcribed for this site from the original parish records by volunteers, and sometimes (but not often), there are mistakes. What they have made available online is great.

Many parishes in Finland are covered, and quite a few years have been covered. Keep in mind that more recent info is not posted (Finnish privacy laws?). The years covered vary by parish, and I seem to find many of the church records I hope to find information from have info from about 1700 to 1850. I have found a lot of good family info there!

What might they have? Births, christening dates, marriages, and deaths are the most commonly found items by me. These may also include farm names they resided on when the event occurred, causes of death, and occupation (or social status).

When filling out the search form, you don't have to fill out every section. For patronymic, sometimes unexpected forms of abbreviation may have been used. One example is Anderson, sometimes it is spelled out as expected, sometimes not. If I can't find what I want by the name I expected, I go back and search using only the first letter of the name. That sometimes helps.

You may also wish to expand your search by including more years in the date you are searching for.

For my level of certainty on any results I find here, I label my results no higher than "Almost Certain" because I am not seeing the actual original document.

Document Your Ancestors

Documenting your source of information for your ancestors is an easy thing to do, though it may add a minute or so to each and every event you discover about an ancestor's life, it may be important to know where you got the information later on.

Be specific, if it is off a website, don't just give the name of the website, copy and paste the url (webpage address) as the source of your information.

If your genealogy software allows it, give a confidence level to the accuracy of your source. What is the perfect source of information? For me, it is seeing an image of  the actual document. It would be nice to see the actual document, but that is probably almost impossible for most of us.

Last Names In Finland

Last night while working on one pair of my 3rd great grandparents I had more than my usual amount of confusion as I started out.

I felt fairly confident that my 3rd great grandfather's name was Johan Andersson Luomanperä.

Yet I found references to what I believed was him listing him as Johan Andersson Herlefvi and also Johan Andersson Huhtakangas. Adding to my confusion was that he was from Ullava, Finland. I had no other ancestors from this town.

Could this be the same person?

Yes! What we think of today as a permanent last name was, in the time of my 3rd great grandfather the name of the farm they lived on.  If they moved to a different farm, they took that farm name as their "last name".

Usually my male ancestors were born, lived their lives, and died on the same farm. Not so with Johan, and that added over an hour to my research just trying to convince myself that these three names referred to the same person.

Genealogy Software

I suppose I could have organized the information on my family history by using word pad or notepad, and that would have been fine up to a point. However, once my knowledge grew to dozens and then hundreds of ancestors I was glad I had genealogy software that greatly simplified my family history.

There is free genealogy software available, do a Google search and you will find an assortment of programs. Of course you can always purchase genealogy software.

What do I use?  I started with Ancestral Quest, and it really made my record keeping easy. I accumulated information on 1,637 individuals that I believed I was related to, then my computer died (I did have backup on another device).

I was skeptical of the accuracy of some of my existing information, and decided to start all over again on my replacement computer.

Just for fun, I decided to try the free version of Legacy Family Tree for my redo of my family ancestry. I liked it enough that I soon upgraded to their paid version. Legacy Family Tree has an excellent support group on Facebook, and that is one of the reasons why I decided to use Legacy Family Tree as my only actively used genealogy software.

I am sure there must be other great genealogy software programs available, but those are the two I have tried, with no complaints about either one.

My Four Family Trees

Tracing my family back through the generations I like knowing which of my four family trees each of my ancestors belongs to.

Four family trees? Yes, I like to know whether an individual belongs in my paternal grandfather's, paternal grandmother's, maternal grandfather's, or maternal grandmother's family tree.

I suppose other people may not find this as important as I do, but it is nice knowing at a glance which of my four family trees an individual is part of.  How do I accomplish this? It is so simple I am ashamed to admit it took a couple years for me to come up with it.

My software allows me to display an image (or profile picture) for each person in my family history. I created four images that simply say "Ancestor Of" and which of my grandparents this person is a blood relative of. Then I use that same image file over and over again for anyone that belongs in that family tree.

There are people I document that are not blood relatives, yet still belong in my family trees. A simple example would be an individual that married my grandfather's sister. For that type of relationship, I have created and image with the words "No, not directly related, related by marriage"