A good place to start your genealogical research is conversations with your parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Collect any information they may have about your family’s previous generations. This includes all the names a person might have used, everywhere they lived, and the critical dates in their lives, like birth, death, and marriage. However, genealogy is not just about collecting names and dates. The larger goal is to collect information about your ancestors’ lives. Write down all information you hear. Also ask if there are any photographs. Photographs can contain important information, and pictures are valuable if you plan to create a lineage book or other kind of publication.
The information that you get from your living relatives is especially valuable because personal data that is less than 100 or 120 years old is not freely available in Finland. This means that to find your ancestors in the free records in Finland, you need to have information about people who lived in Finland in the late 1800s. Discovering information about more recent ancestors is both more difficult and more expensive. If you have information on grandparents or great grand-parents (birthplace, birthdate, marriage date, or death date ) who lived in Finland in the 1800s, it is easier to find information on the Internet.
You can find general information on the the Finnish genealogy resources from tab Finnish Genealogy resources and examples how to use the resources from my posts.
