The Norwegian National Archives changes the blocking rules

The Norwegian National Archives has changed the rules for which information can be displayed from scanned church records in the Digital Archive.

This has been done to comply with the current legislation for privacy and online publishing. The changes were introduced on 23 February 2023 and apply to all scanned church records in the Digital Archive.

Fortunately, these changes will not have great implications for the vast majority of us genealogists.

The Public Relations Act (Offentliglova) and related regulations provide a framework for what the Norwegian Archives can publish freely available on the Internet. The National Archives’ blocking rules for scanned church records have not been sufficiently adapted to these frameworks, and therefore the National Archives has made changes from 23 February 2023.

In order to protect privacy, the National Archives must tighten up what information is available. The changes apply from 23 February 2023 and have a retroactive effect.

This includes the Public Relations Act (Offentliglova) § 7 prohibits the internet publication of certain information such as social security numbers, and numbers with a similar function, as well as information mentioned in Articles 9 and 10 of the Personal Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In practice, the prohibition applies to information about still-living persons.

The information referred to in Articles 9 and 10 of the Personal Data Protection Regulation includes personal information about racial or ethnic origin, political opinion, religion, philosophical beliefs or trade union membership, as well as health information, information about a person’s sexual relationship or sexual orientation, and personal information about criminal convictions and offenses or related security measures.

Many of these categories of personal information, and in particular personal information about religion and religious affiliation, appear in the church registers.

What are the practical implications of this? The new blocking rules mean that some church register pages that were previously blocked are now opened, and that some church register pages that were previously open are now blocked. The changes can be summarized as follows:

• Confirmation records are blocked for 86 years. Previously, these were restricted for 100 years from 1935. The changes therefore mean that those confirmed in 1935 and 1936 have immediately become freely available, and that a new cohort will be available at each turn of the year. With the old blocking rules, confirmed 1935 would only become available on 1 January 2036.
• Betrothed and married, including civilly married, are freely available until 1949. From 1950, these categories are blocked for 82 years. The changes entail a tightening, because these categories have been freely available in scanned church books published 2005-2015, while they have been blocked for 60 years in scanned church books published since 2016.
• In-migrated and out-migrated are barred for 100 years. The changes entail a tightening, because these categories were previously freely available. Church registers from the last 100 years, however, contain almost no moving lists, so the change means little in practice.
• People joining or leaving the state church are banned for 100 years. The changes entail a tightening, because these categories were previously blocked for 60 years.
• For other list types in the scanned church books, there are no changes.