Lutheran Church registers to enter digital age next year

Data services for parishioners will become quicker, cheaper, and more centralised

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By Timo Siukonen
     
      The parish registers within the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland will be transformed into electronic form at the beginning of next year.
      The move will spell the end of the long-time tradition of keeping handwritten church records.
      Such records will now be replaced by a database called Kirjuri (“Scribe”) shared by all the Lutheran congregations in the country.
      The database will benefit the church members, the church administration, and the church housekeeping alike. The services will become faster, easier, cheaper, and more centralised.
      Taking care of one’s affairs becomes simpler. For example, someone living in Helsinki can order his or her extract from the parish register via the Internet, or, while on a summer holiday elsewhere in Finland, from the local church registry office there.
     
Even in the future, the baptisms, burials, weddings, divorces, moves, and other membership data related to church members will be put on record by their home parishes. The godparents and the confirmation classes of an individual will also be included in the database.
      Kirjuri will also deal with the red tape related to estate inventories, judicial impediments to marriage, or changing one’s name.
     
To run the service, the Church Government and IBM have signed a five-year service contract.
      The IT consulting corporation will run and develop the church’s information technology systems and programmes and maintain the servers and databases. The signed contract is worth EUR 2.7 million.
      “The congregations in Finland have maintained records of their members by using various media already from the 1620s. This is the country’s oldest client database”, explains IT outsourcing director Jan Sippel from IBM.
     
The company’s data centres are situated in various addresses in the capital area.
      For security reasons their exact locations are kept secret. To ensure that the immeasurably valuable information is preserved for future generations, the system is continously backed up. In other words, the data is kept in two separate machine vaults, which are both under 24-hour surveillance.
      Even those who have access to Kirjuri will be carefully selected and trained so that the parishioners’ personal details will not end up in the wrong hands.
     
The service contract was signed already at the turn of the year, but it was not made public until the Easter week.
      According to data administration chief Jouko Tokkari of the Jyväskylä Congregation, this renewal project means that more than a thousand workstations will have to be updated by 2011.
      Even though the Church Government will cover some of the expenses, the congregation will still have to tip in more than EUR 400,000 of its own money.
      The Finnish parishes are currently running digitising projects, in which old handwritten documents dating back to the 1860s are being converted into a format that a computer can understand.
      Many of the parishes have outsourced the work, and not all of them will be able to complete the task by the turn of the year.
     
For the time being, the Finnish Orthodox Church continues to keep its own central registry.
      The head of the registry Harri Taljakka explains that the Orthodox Church will keep an eye on how the Lutherans are getting on with their project.
      If the changeover goes off without hiccups, the Orthodox Church may join the same system in a couple of years’ time.
      No official decisions have been made yet regarding the matter.
     
The Evangelical Lutheran Church and the Orthodox Church levy a mutually agreed fee for parish register documents containing parishioners’ personal details.
      To obtain one’s own information is free of charge.
      For data regarding other parishioners a fee of EUR 4.50 is levied per family or generation.
      For genealogy research, the price is EUR 33 per hour, divided into 20-minute segments. For statements issued for scientific research, the price is EUR 18 per hour.
     
The requested documents are delivered through regular mail.
      For security reasons, church registry information is not spread via email.
      The orders for extracts from the parish register or ancestry reports, however, can be put in via regular mail, telephone, fax, or email.
     
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 6.4.2010


Links:
  Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland

TIMO SIUKONEN / Helsingin Sanomat
timo.siukonen@hs.fi