Teisko Parish Häme Finland Genealogy Familysearch

Leo Migdal

-Dec 6, 2025, 10:52 PM

teisko parish häme finland genealogy familysearch

HisKi or the historical books database is one of the online services provided by the Genealogical Society of Finland. For many genealogists it is an irreplaceable tool for researching parishes' history books, i.e. lists of baptisms, marriages and burials. HisKi is an aid to research and it cannot replace using original historical documents in doing genealogical research. This page collects information on HisKi, tips on how to use it and how to search on it as well as information on adding to the database. The history of the HisKi database goes back to the 1990s and it is Finland's oldest continuously operating network service.

At first information was entered to the database from hand written copies of parish history books - so called "black books" - commissioned by the Genealogical Society of Finland in the 1920s-1940s. But today the database is updated straight from digitized original church records through a separate platform. HisKi's entries are often the result of a three part copying process and the database may contain errors that go back to incorrect entries made by clergy at the time, the copying process of... For this reason one must be critical of information found in HisKi and you should use the database only as an aid to research and you should always check the information from primary sources. At its best, HisKi is an aid to genealogical research through which you can make a quick overview of the family under investigation and search where in the country certain family or house names... The homepage of HisKi opens up a list of parishes and on its right side is a map of Finland divided by region.

You can choose to search a single parish, all the parishes entered into the database or several parishes by clicking your mouse onto their names while pressing the CTRL-button. You can also choose parishes geographically by clicking the map or select a region from the drop-down menu below the map. After selecting a parish, click on the Selected button to move to the book menu where you can choose the precise book that you want to research. If you have only one parish chosen, the screen will only show those books that have information available. After the books, the cut-off years are displayed from which information has been entered into the database. In addition to information on baptisms, marriages and burials, HisKi also has lists of people who have moved as well as statistics that are shown in the book menu.

Finland is one of the countries where genealogy is relatively easy. Church records begin at the end of the 17th century and tax records as early as the 1540s. Individual documents exist even earlier. Finland was part of the Swedish realm until 1809, after which it became an autonomous Grand Duchy of the Russian Empire. Finland gained independence in 1917. However, the southeastern part of the country belonged to Russia as early as the 1720s and 1740s.

This part of the country is referred to as Old Finland. In principle, Finnish ancestry can be reliably traced back to 1540. At that time, by order of King Gustav Vasa, land registers, or lists of land-owning peasants, began to be kept. The land registers recorded the tax base of a particular farm. For the first couple of hundred years, the names of the farms were missing from the land registers, as the names of the farmers were recorded in the documents instead. Gradually, tithe lists were also started, in which the taxes paid by the farms were recorded.

These documents are called bailiff and county accounts depending on the time. Until 1634, taxes were collected by bailiff, so we are talking about bailiff accounts. From then on, the county division came into effect in Finland, so the same documents became county accounts. The research is greatly facilitated by finding out which bailiff or county a certain parish belonged to at the time. Court records refer to the minutes of the district courts in the countryside and the magistrate and chamber courts in the cities. Court records can also include the minutes of the higher courts, i.e.

the appellate and appellate courts. In addition to these, there were various special courts. A draft minute was made at the trial session, which was then written clean after the session. These clean copies are called renovated minutes. The Turku Court of Appeal was founded in 1623, and from that year onwards, Finland has, in principle, an unbroken series of trial minutes. However, for example, the fire of Turku in 1827 destroyed a lot of material.

Finland's oldest church records date back to the mid-17th century.[1] Ecclesiastical population records developed significantly thanks to the Bishop of Turku, Johannes Gezelius, who in the 1660s gave detailed instructions on the maintenance of... The Church Law of 1686 confirmed the maintenance of church records throughout the Swedish realm. The establishment of Sweden's tabular institution in 1749 and the collection of population statistics further refined church record entries. The information was collected and sent to the national statistics in Stockholm. By the mid-19th century, church records had become very accurate also from the point of view of population records. It was not until the 18th century that uniform church record series became common.

From the mid-19th century onwards, the coverage and diversity of the archives increased significantly. The language of church archives changed from Swedish to Finnish at the end of the 19th century. During the Swedish rule, only the Evangelical Lutheran faith was allowed to be practiced publicly. In the eastern part of the country, the practice of the Greek Catholic religion was also allowed. Representatives of other denominations had to practice their faith behind closed doors, and there were not many of them in Finland. The best thing about Finnish genealogy is that the National Archives has extensively digitized the aforementioned tax sources.

Similarly, the National Archives has extensively digitized all parish registers and lists of christenings, marriages and burials from the oldest to around 1870. Some of them have been digitized from later times as well, for example, the church records of the so-called ceded area. The ceded area refers to the areas that remained in the then Soviet Union after the last wars from Finland. All the aforementioned archives can be researched completely freely via the Internet and you do not need to log in separately. However, it should be noted that due to data protection regulations, church records that are less than a hundred years old cannot be put on the Internet. You can study documents less than 100 years old at the National Archives' various locations, but you need a permit for this.

Through MyHeritage you will find a large number of clean parish registers and lists of christenings, marriages and burials. This section is a placeholder for information about the Teisko surname. Surname information is crowd-sourced; the Geni community would be grateful if you helped update this page with information about the Teisko surname.

Teisko Parish Häme Finland Genealogy Familysearch

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