Ahvenanmaa County, Finland Genealogy

Europe Finland  Ahvenanmaa County

Guide to Ahvenanmaa County, Finland ancestry, family history, and genealogy: birth records, marriage records, death records, census records, parish registers, and military records.

History
Åland Islands (Ahvenanmaa in Finnish), an archipelago, lie between Finland and Sweden, with a Swedish-speaking population but politically an autonomous region of Finland in recent times. Historically, the entire western portion of modern Finland was ruled by Sweden for a few hundred years but lost to Russia in 1809 after a war. The history of Åland gets even more complex during the 1900s but the control by Finland always maintained to some degree. Older vital records were kept by the state church and are mostly in Swedish.