The cornerstone of unity

6 POPULATION REGISTER 
Finland began to keep a register of all the country’s inhabitants in the 16th century already, with the Finnish 
church and state beginning the practice around the same time.
The main motive for this for the state was to facilitate taxation and conscription. The Swedish-Finnish state 
was at that time a very sparsely-populated and poor country, so the maintenance of an extensive administrative 
and military organisation necessitate
d information about the “conscriptable population” and tax-liable citizens 
and their property. 
Information about people and their property started to be collected in separate and continuously-updated 
documents. The population register was born of the documents on people, while the documents on property 
evolved into register on property ownership. 
Parallel to the population register was the register that was kept by the Lutheran church, which was inspired 
by the need to save souls. The register on the one hand included congregation lists and on the other hand 
monitored church activities and related events. The result of all this was comprehensive documentation that also 
included family relationships. The registers that the church kept had sufficient information about population 
changes and family relationships, so the state’s registers didn’t concern itself with such details. 
When a dependable and comprehensive census for the whole country was deemed necessary in the 18th 
century, the state was unwilling to pay for the costs of collecting the basic information. Congregations were thus 
charged with contributing information about their local register to state officials from the Department of Statistics. 
The earliest census statistics were thus gathered on the basis of church registers. This created a foundation for 
a more comprehensive population census in later years. 
The population register in Swedish Finland was not the first project of its kind in the world: similar lists had 
been compiled hundreds if not thousands of years ago in Egypt and China, while in the western hemisphere the 
most famous was perhaps the tax-collection drive that Emperor Augustus ordered, and which is mentioned in 
the New Testament. 
However, the register that began in Swedish Finland is unique because of its continuity. Having begun in the 
mid-16th century it has continued without a break until the present day. 
Old population registers that have been compiled by the church and the state have been preserved for later 
generations, and the data is a rich source of information for researchers. Old population registers have yielded 

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unique information to help genealogy researchers as well as medical studies. 
The ongoing registration of details for the local population register survived unchanged for a long time. 
Manual transcription of the register, which had been the way for centuries, began to be computerised in the 
1970s, and at this time the local registers that had been maintained separately by the church and the state were 
combined for the first time. 
Since then, information about residents of Finland has been available to the authorities at the touch of a 
button through the National Population Information System. 
Over the last forty years the methods of collecting the information have been constantly improved. While 
information was earlier collected with the help of forms which took several weeks to register, nowadays most 
of the information in Finland’s National Population Information System can be transferred electronically from 
other civil servants. Information is registered very fast: new details reach the register within days. 
The information is also used more widely. The population register was originally established to serve the 
needs of national and local government, especially with regards to taxation and conscription, but in recent 
decades the system has been increasingly used in the business world. Nowadays in Finland over half of the 
usage of the population register caters for the business world’s needs. The most important use is however still in 
serving national and local government. 
The broad use of the National Population Information System is also a guarantee of quality. When the 
information is used, mistakes are revealed and can then be fixed. Finland’s National Population Information 
System is among the best in the world in terms of comprehensiveness and quality. 
Every country constructs a population register according to its own needs and possibilities. A system that 
suits one country will not necessarily suit another. In the development of the population register it is necessary to 
take many factors into account: the country’s economic and technological possibilities, history, laws, values and 
culture. 
In Finland the information content in the electronic National Population Information System is impressive. The 
system contains important and current information about every citizen. The most important information is the 
person’s name, date and place of birth and their nationality. Information about their family relationships (spouse, 
children and parents) and street address are also important. 
Every person in Finland has an identity number that has been created by the National Population Information 
System, and this means that people with the same name or the same date of birth can be differentiated from 
each other. The identity number is registered in the National Population Information System and is widely used 
in all kinds of national information systems. This identification number makes it possible to use registers 
efficiently. The use of this identification requires strict adherence to the principles of data protection. 
An up-do-date population register makes it possible to take care of many societal matters in a reliable and 
efficient manner. For example, the register makes it cheaper to compile statistics and take care of elections, 
taxation and the distribution of benefits. Using the system also reduces the amount of bureaucracy. When 
officials retrieve information about individuals from the reliable electronic population register, people themselves 
carry less of an administrative burden as they do not have to provide information to different authorities over and 
over again. 
Every country in the world carries out a regular census. The purpose of this is to gather reliable information 
about the country’s citizens and their living conditions. In most countries the information is collected every 5 or 
10 years. 
Usually data for the census is collected in such a way that a specific organisation is created to plan the forms 
and collect the information face-to-face and then record and store and turn the massive data bank into statistics. 
Censuses in Finland have been carried out recently every 20 years in a way that the information is collected 
directly from the existing information system, so it is never necessary to ask citizens to provide information using 
forms. The register-based census that is carried out in Finland costs a fraction of what traditional manual 
collection costs in other countries. Additionally, the information can be quickly accessed when required. 
A broad and detailed population register is an important base for many functions in every country. As the 
register holds important personal information it is important that it is safeguarded from inappropriate use. For this 
reason a data protection system must be well enforced to keep the data safe. 
Data protection principles are encoded in the law. It is also important that use of the information can be 
monitored. Since it would be a huge problem if the information was to fall into the wrong hands, the safety of the 
information is not just guarded legally but also in many other practical ways such as information technology to 

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prevent unauthorized use. 
Hannu Luntiala 
– Director of Population Register Centre