Sweden - Project Resources

Date: [unknown] [unknown]
Location: sweden
Surnames/tags: sweden nordic

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Contents 1 Reliable Sources 1.1 Direct links to Riksarkivet 2 Unreliable Sources 3 Frauds and fabrications

Reliable Sources

• Riksarkivet (Free)
  • More info on Riksarkivet
• ArkivDigital ($)
  • More info on ArkivDigital

Direct links to Riksarkivet

• Church archives (Births, Marriages, Deaths, Husförhör, relocation records) Church records for Swedish parishes may go back to the early 1600s, more typically to the last decades of the 1600's. In many cases, however there are no pre-1700 parish records. Court records, taxation records and land deeds go further back, but are hard to locate and can be even harder to read. The house interrogations is perhaps the most useful resource for Swedish research, as it in most cases lets you track families and individuals from birth to burial within a certain frame of time. Also known as "house calls", it was a reoccurring examination of each individual's knowledge in Christianity and performed yearly by the parish priests between 1686 and 1895. Although not every parish has husförhör stretching quite so far back you are likely to be able to find them from the beginning of 1800's. They were also a socially motivated demographic control imposed by the government at the local level and thus contains more information than just Christianity knowledge. In 1895 the husförhör was replaced by Församlingsboken'; the church register which in turn was replaced in 1991. The parish register listed everyone who was written on the property continuously much like the husförhör with name, occupation, date and place of birth, date of death, marital status, relocation information and more. Like the house interrogation it still contained information of a religious nature, such as communion, house examinations, and grades in Christian studies. See also: Swedish Church Archives

• Births - Marriages - Deaths 1860–1948 (searchable by year) This database contains extracts from the church records and excludes information like christening, marriage banns and burials, but in return are searchable by year and reaches into the mid-1900's unlike the church records who are often cut off around 1930 due to privacy rules.

• Folkräkningen 1860-1930 Every 10 years the Swedish census was taken, these are available at Riksarkivet for the years 1880, 1890, 1900, 1910; and incomplete censuses for the years 1860, 1870 and 1930. Many researchers also have access to various CD's containing the Swedish deaths the latest version being Sveriges Dödsbok 7 (1860-2016) as well as censuses for 1970, 1980 and 1990 called Sveriges Befolkning. (These are not available online due to privacy rules but it is always a good idea to post a request the G2G forum if you want help looking someone up. Remember to tag the post with "sweden"!) See also: Swedish Census Search

• Rosenbergs Geografiska Lexikon This database gives over 65,000 places within Sweden and includes all parishes, most villages and larger farms. Printed originally in 1883 meaning it contains original spellings of place names before the spelling reform which took place in 1906. You would want to consult this database if you can not find the location (parish) with a specific place name.

• Svenskt Biografiskt Lexikon Biographical lexicon of notables in Sweden from medieval times and on. Signed articles including source references. Produced by Riksarkivet, still a work in progress (A-S complete)

• See also: "Rötter" Sweden's probably largest website for Swedish family researchers, with a very active forum and a lot of resources, guides etc.

Unreliable Sources

• User-contributed family trees at sites like: FamilySearch, Ancestry, Geni, MyHeritage, Rootsweb, WikiTree, Geneanet etc.
  • A tree without sources is insufficient as a source for WikiTree profiles.
  • A tree with precise dates and places will usually be a good guide of where to look for original records. Please take the time to do so. In these cases it is courteous to give credit (under See also); however when the tree exists in multiple copies on the net you may not be crediting the original builder. (In quite a few cases, precise dates and places, particularly before 1700, may be signs of fabrication. Watch out for exact birth years and places before parish records exist.)
  • When a tree does present sources, please take the time to look up the original sources. Give credit.
• User-contributed family trees kept privately. The same as above applies here.
  • There are many Swedish family trees kept online by users with their own private sites. Some of them are very solid, often presenting their sources. These trees definitely deserve credit.
  • There is, however, the drawback that links to specific pages in these trees tend to break when the owner updates the site.
• Find A Grave memorials are not a sufficient source for Swedish pre-1700 profiles
• There is a lot of published research of a more or less reliable character, like pastorologies (herdaminnen) and published genealogies for nobility and other prominent families like Adelsvapen Wiki . Also, for many areas there are published databases. These have to be evaluated.

Frauds and fabrications

Be aware of the possibility of frauds and fabrications used to create connections to noble or otherwise desirable ancestors. There is a whole category listing some of the known frauds:

• Frauds and Fabrications, including the
• Gustave Anjou Fraud where some lines go back to Scandinavian nobility. This is not one single publication - Anjou made his living in America over three decades by selling fabricated genealogies to individual customers.