How do I search for a place? Surnames in Sweden are not a valuable way to search.

Question

Hi all, I know a bit about my great-grandmother Selma Christine Anderson, who emigrated from Sweden to the US in 1888. In fact, I know that she was born in Silvberg, Säter, Dalarna/ Kopparbergs. Searching for Anderson or Andersson will be useless; I need to find others looking in Säter, or at least in Dalarna/ Kopparbergs.

I don't see a way to conveniently do this.

Valorie

Answer 1

Hi Valorie,

Since you know that she was born in the parish of Silvberg that is where you need to start looking. Look in the birth records because it will most likely tell you the name of the place where the family lived. There you will also find the name of the parents and godparents. Then you go to the household records and look up the mentioned place and you will most likely find the family there and can follow them forward or backwards through the household records. You can find the records through Ancestry, Arkiv Digital or SVAR (the Swedish Archives). I found the family in the Swedish 1880 census and then they were living in Östra Selfberg (the name of the village), Silvberg Parish, Kobbarberg County, Dalarna Province. Another thing... Selmas proper LNAB would be Andersdotter since she is the daughter of Anders. It was not until around 1900 that people started inheriting the patronyms of their fathers.

Comments

Thank you for your informative answer. Indeed I ordered those parish films back in the day, but am still finding all my old research and making sure it makes it here, and in my gedcom! I might go to the library and use their Ancestry instance to download the images; thanks for telling me where to get them.

Anderson was how she reported her surname - another reason surnames are tricksy in Swedish research, or anywhere patronyms are used. I'll move that down to "other surnames used" then.

Valorie

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I am not sure why women not used the -dotter after moving to the states. Maybe they were just asked what their father's surname was and then it stuck.

Answer 2

Hi Valerie

You can use the Find menu's People Search.

At the top right of that page it says:  1. People | 2. Surnames | 3. Matches | 4. Text

Click on Text.

Then put the words you want to search for, eg Silvberg or Andersson Kopparbergs, in the box beside where it says:

  Search for Any Text Use Google to search WikiTree pages:

Comments

Thank you, Maryann. I'll try this in the future. I wish this was an integral part of the listing, though. Dates, especially estimated dates only go so far. People live their lives in *places*, so locality is key.

Especially as people get beyond their immigrants and begin researching in the home country, surnames fade and locality rises in importance.

Valorie