“Hverra manna ert þú?” (Who are your people?)

Iceland has a bit of a genealogical problem. There is an official web site / database called Íslendingabók for Icelanders to visit to ensure/help when they meet someone to check in case they are related. This occurrence is (apparently) fairly common. Access to the database is limited to Icelanders with an official Icelandic ID number (kennitala).

From the web site:

¨The database Íslendingabók contains genealogical information about the inhabitants of Iceland, dating more than 1,200 years back. Íslendingabók is a collaboration project between deCODE genetics, a research company in the field of medical genetics, and Friðrik Skúlason, an anti-virus software entrepreneur. The project’s goal is to trace all known family connections between Icelanders from the time of the settlement of Iceland to present times and register the genealogical information in a database.

In the creation of the Íslendingabók database we have used various sources and both unpublished and published documents. Most of the genealogical information comes from sources such as church records, national censuses, inhabitants registers and other public documents, but in addition to these sources there are chronicles, books of convictions, various publications on genealogy, books about individuals within specific occupations, lists of descendants and ancestral records as well as memorial articles to name but a few.

The database is in Icelandic and is unfortunately not available in other languages.¨

The database has proven very popular but it has caused a number of ´issues´ where it has been discovered that the records containing the registered fathers name do not match with the biological records.

There is more to be read here.