About what you can find for parishes in the National Archives

Profile managers: Eva Ekeblad [send private message] and Sweden Project WikiTree [send private message]

The Swedish National Archives collect and preserve records from government, public bodies, organisations and individuals from the Middle Ages onwards. There is an extensive collection of digitized images of church records from Swedish parishes available in the Digital Research Room. The actual records will be archived in one of the national repositories.

Find the parish archive

You may begin your search at the page for Church archives, where there is a simple box for Search archive/parish.

If you want to search for records from Grangärde parish you either need to spell the parish name correctly with an "ä" - or you can use a truncation "Grang*". The search result gives a link to the archive (or archives).

There is also a County menu, which gives a list (with links) to all the parish archives in the chosen county if you prefer that.

Sometimes, like with "Skog" you will discover that there is more than one parish with the same name.

Navigate the archive

The listing for the archive of a chosen parish has columns for:

• Type of document
• Volume - Code for the physical archive, code for the doc type and volume number
• Date
• Note - remarks about the volume
• Image - a green button that opens a new fullscreen window for the image, but allows right-clicking to open in a new tab if you prefer.

Above the listing there will be an Archive link with the code for the physical archive, e.g. Grangärde kyrkoarkiv, Dalarnas län (SE/ULA/12220 ). This link takes you to the full listing of this parish archive, where a symbol indicates digitized records (there may be digitized records of a few more types, notably the L series.).

Types of document

There are standardized codes for the various types of record. However, the actual volumes often contain records of more than one type, so that what you are looking for may be found under another code letter.

A - Husförhörslängder - Household records

Records organized by village, farm and household, giving a summary of the events in a household for the given period of time. Very good for "keeping a family together" - but dates of birth et cetera may be unreliable.

Household records usually start later than records for birth, marriage and death - and the early household records often span very long periods of time, making for very messy pages. Also, the household records started out as records of cathechism examinations, so sometimes the early ones are only just that, ticking off the results for examined household members (not always giving the names of anybody but the head of household, not even including the youngest children).

B - In- och utflyttningslängder - Records of "arrivals" and "departures"

Records of who moved into the parish or out of the parish.

C - Födelse- och dopböcker - Birth and baptism

Primary records for birth and baptism. Early records often give only the date of baptism, but in Sweden children were almost never baptized later than a week after birth. (A combination of law and superstition).

The early ministerial books often have birth, marriage and death records in the same volume, usually, but not always, archived under code C.

D - Konfirmations- och kommunionlängder - Confirmation and communion

Records of confirmation and communion. Not compulsory, so they do not always exist.

E - Lysnings och vigselböcker - Banns and marriage

Primary records for marriage

F - Död- och begravningsböcker - Death and burial

Primary records for death. Early books often give only the burial date. In some parishes the earliest records for deaths are in the church accountancy books (code L) as lists of "testament to the church" for the deceased.