The Church of Norway is an Evangelical-Lutheran church with 3.7 million members. All around Norway there are about 1600 churches. Many of them are very old. Of the 1600 churches, 1000 were built before the year 1900. There used to be 750 stave churches, but only 28 remain today.

The Lutheran church was up until 2012 the State Church of Norway. In recent years, a smaller percentage of the population attends services, though many infants are still christened, and couples married, in church. Funeral services may also be held in church, or in the small chapels belonging to some of the larger cemeteries.

Parish records

In Norway, due to the fact that the Lutheran church was the state church, their clergy had dual roles: not only were they pastors for their congregations, they also had some civil duties.

Until well into the 1900s, parish registers were the country’s official records of births, marriages and deaths. The clergy also recorded other ecclesiastical events such as confirmations. These are the main sources for genealogists working with Norwegian ancestry.

Public registration of the population started gradually from 1905, when the local councils were given the responsibility. But the National Population Register (Folkeregisteret) was not fully organized until 1964, and little of their material is accessible to the public.

How to find information on Lutheran parish churches

The website KIRKESØK is only in Norwegian, but your browser may have translation functions, such as Google Translate.

You may search by entering the name of the parish or town in the top search field, Søk etter kirker, and usually this is adequate to find the church you’re interested in. The bottom dropdown menus allow you to select a time span, county, what material the church was built of (timber or stone/brick), and whether the church has been listed for conservation.

An example:

Haslum parish church in Bærum, a suburb of Oslo, is one of the oldest stone churches still standing in Norway.

Entering Haslum in the top search field gives us some matches. This is because some others have similar names or information. The first is the one we want to learn more about. We click on the picture and find a page giving us more information, as well as three photos of the building. Pictures of churches and cemeteries are good for illustrating family histories, especially for those ancestors we don’t have photos of.

We learn that the church was built in the year 1190, is cruciformed, and since it was built before 1650, it is automatically on the list of historic buildings for conservation. The architect’s name is given, but P. H. Holtermann was responsible for restoring the church in 1853, and not the original architect, whose name is probably not known. Since the church is still in use, there are some useful facts such as opening hours, contact details, and accessibility.

Wikipedia gives us even more information about Haslum parish church.

Try a search in Kirkesøk for a church where one of your ancestors worshipped! And tell us what you found in the comments on Facebook.

Would you like to learn more about Norwegian Genealogy, read our book Exploring Norwegian Genealogy.