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Research in Sweden

You have now, hopefully, collected all information available through your sources in America. If you have been successful, you will have found and verified the essential information - the original name or names, the birth dates and birthplaces. You will have negotiated the most crucial, yet difficult, hurdle of all. You will have discovered the link that bridges the Atlantic Ocean and puts you in touch with myriad possibilities that lie on the other side.

We now come to the next step. What can be found in Sweden? For a person who has never visited Sweden, this question may be perplexing. How does one go about it? Where does an individual turn in order to do genealogical research there?

It is best to first look at the Swedish system of recording vital statistics. Until 1991, the keeping of vital statistics in Sweden was the duty of the established church. Every parish in Sweden was required to maintain the records of its parishioners, even if some of them never set foot inside the church itself. Every birth, death, marriage, removal from the parish, or entry into it was carefully recorded by the clergyman of the parish or his assistant; or, if in a large city, by the clerical staff at his service. This system was put into effect in the latter half of the seventeenth century and, except in such parishes where the manse or the church office burned, the records are extant today.

Before proceeding with a description of these records and the various archives in which they are deposited, it might be well to mention the Swedish system of administration. The country is divided into twenty-one counties (län), roughly equivalent to individual states in the United States (view map). Sometimes these län are identical with the historic province, known as landskap, which is not an administrative unit but, rather, a geographical concept. There may be more than on län in a landskap, as for instance Småland, which contains within it three län; namely, Kronoberg, Jönköping and Kalmar. Each län is subdivided into smaller units, each known as fögderi. These fögderier as well as the towns and cities have their own administration. Juridically, each län is divided into other units, each known as härad. A fögderi may include several härader. Ecclesiastically, each län is further divided into smaller units known as parishes. These were at one time called socknar, but are today known as församlingar. For our purposes, it is the material from the härad (juridical) and the parish (vital statistical) that interests us the most. In order to simplify the storing and archiving of records and to make them more readily available to scholars, records from the parishes of one or more län, one hundred years old or more, are kept in regional archives called landsarkiv. A few cities have been given the right to establish their own city archives (stadsarkiv), which handle the records of the churches and courts within their jurisdiction. Here follows an enumeration of some of the documents that will provide important information to the researcher.