Thanks to a multi-year collaborative project with Ancestry, MyHeritage, and FamilySearch, Arkivverket (National Archives of Norway) now has 80 million names in its Digital Archives.
Last week, MyHeritage announced it had released its collection, Historical Norway Church Records, 1815–1938, that contains 42.2 million indexed birth and baptism, marriage, and death and burial records, along with high quality scans of the original documents.
At about the same time, Ancestry released its searchable collection of Norwegian church records, containing 41,391,903 records, on its site.
Soon, these records will also be available to search for free on FamilySearch.
Images of the church register images have been available through Arkivverket for years, but have not been searchable by name. This release on the three genealogy companies’ websites marks the first time that Norwegiany church records have been widely indexed, made available online, and searchable.
According to Arkiverket, the three genealogy companies are helping make the Norwegian church registers searchable on the national archives’ website. In return, the three genealogy companies received permission to publish the records on their website.
The records in this collection cover a critical period in Norway’s history, beginning just one year after its secession from Denmark.
The collection helps overcome the significant gaps in Norwegian censuses taken from 1801 to 1865. Five censuses were collected in Norway during those years, but they did not record names of individuals, making the church records the definitive source for genealogical data during that period.
Due to Norwegian privacy laws, the birth and baptism records released in this collection extend until 1919, the marriage records extend until 1937, and the death and burial records extend until 1938.
It appears the records will eventually be available to search for free on Arkivverket’s Digital Archives, which is provided in Norwegian and English. According to genealogists on social media, the searchable feature in the Digital Archives could take some time.
Meanwhile, the collaboration with MyHeritage, Ancestry, FamilySearch and Arkivverket continues. The three genealogy companies are in the process of scanning and transcribing other sources from the national archives. Together with contributions from Norwegian volunteers, Arkivverket expects it won’t be long before the searchable number of individuals’ names in the Digital Archives reaches 100 million.
On an interesting note, MyHeritage is the only major genealogy company to provide its services and full customer support in all three Scandinavian languages, as well as in Finnish.
According to MyHeritage, it offers “the greatest opportunity for new family history discoveries for anyone with Scandinavian origins. Not only is MyHeritage the genealogy market leader in Norway, but its popularity is so high that one in every five Norwegians is a registered user of MyHeritage.”
