Finding your Swedish ancestors

First, find the parish

Every Swedish record was kept by the parish (socken or församling) where the person lived. There is no national index of births, so the name of the home parish is the key to everything else.

Surnames will not always help. Most people used a patronymic: Anders, son of Johan, was Johansson; his sister was Johansdotter. Only on 5 December 1901 did Sweden pass its first law on personal names, which made people without a fixed surname take the masculine form of their father's. Soldiers were often given a new surname on enlistment, and many emigrants used a different surname in America.

The church was the registry office

The first nationwide rule on church registration came with the church law of 1686, which took effect in 1688. From then on, the parish priest kept the register of the whole population. The Church of Sweden kept this role until 1 July 1991, when the Tax Agency (Skatteverket) took over. All the older registers have since moved to the regional state archives (landsarkiv); in Stockholm, to the city archive.

A few registers are older than the law: the oldest is a death register from 1608 to 1615. In Skåne and Jämtland, under an earlier Danish law, records often start in 1646.

The series letters are the ones used in the archive catalogue, so you can use them to find the right volume.

Household examination rolls: the family year by year

The household examination rolls (husförhörslängder) are what make Swedish research special. The priest visited every household each year and wrote down who lived there. One book usually covered 5 to 10 years. For each person it may give:

• the farm or village, and every member of the household, servants included
• birth date (or age) and birthplace
• moves in and out, marriage and death
• catechism and communion notes, vaccination, military references

They generally begin in the 1720s, and as early as the 1620s in Dalarna and Västmanland. In the mid-1890s they were replaced by the parish book (församlingsbok), which records the same family details without the catechism notes. Moving records (flyttningslängder) were generally not kept before the 1800s.

To follow a family, start from a birth entry, then find the household in each successive roll. Farms often appear in the same order from one book to the next. When a person disappears, look in the moving-out record: it names the parish they went to, or the emigration. The National Archives' parish catalogues (sockenkataloger) show where each village or farm is, to find the right page.

Read them free at the National Archives

The Swedish National Archives (Riksarkivet) publishes its digitised church registers in its Digital Research Room, free of charge. Other free resources on the same site:

• Censuses for 1860, 1870, 1880, 1890, 1900, 1910 and 1930: more than 24 million people searchable by name. The 1930 census is still being indexed.
• Name indexes of births, marriages and deaths for some counties, including Blekinge, Halland, Jämtland, Kristianstad, Malmöhus and Västernorrland.
• Statistical extracts of births, marriages and deaths, 1860 to 1949, useful when a parish register is missing.

ArkivDigital (paid) offers colour images of church books. FamilySearch has free indexes, and Ancestry and MyHeritage have Swedish collections. Indexes can contain errors: always check the original page.

Recent records and copies

Church records are protected by secrecy for 70 years under the Public Access to Information and Secrecy Act. For information 70 years old or less, you may have to go through the archive staff. In the census search, only people born more than 100 years ago can be found.

The National Archives has order forms in English, including one for genealogy research. The entry fee for extensive research is SEK 1,000, which includes at most one hour of work, and it is charged even if nothing is found. Copies start at SEK 5 a page. Name the parish and the records you want searched to keep the cost down.

Since 1 July 1991, the population register has been kept by the Tax Agency, not the church.

Write my letter in Swedish

Emigrant lists and moving-out records

Every emigrant should appear twice in Sweden: in the moving-out record of the home parish, and, from 1869, in the lists the police kept of passengers leaving Swedish ports.

• Gothenburg, the main port: emigrant lists 1869 to 1920, with name indexes 1869 to 1951. They give names, ages, places of birth, destinations and dates of departure. Microfilms are digitised on FamilySearch.
• Malmö: lists 1874 to 1939. Stockholm: 1869 to 1904, with indexes to 1920. Norrköping: indexes 1860 to 1921.

The National Archives lists its emigration sources, including the Gothenburg and Malmö police records, on its emigration page. EmiWeb, a non-profit Nordic database built from parish registers, statistics and passenger lists, mainly for 1820 to 1950, is paid (SEK 600 a year or SEK 200 for three months). The Swedish Emigrant Institute at the House of Emigrants in Växjö holds letters, diaries and about 3,000 recorded interviews with Swedish Americans; its research room is open by booking.

Swedish emigration in numbers

About 1.4 million people left Sweden between 1860 and 1930, most of them for America, according to Statistics Sweden (SCB). Among people born in the second half of the 1800s, about 20% of men and 15% of women emigrated.

From 1851 to 1910, 1,170,456 people left Sweden, and 948,823 of them went to the United States. Emigration peaked in the 1880s; in 1887 alone, 50,786 people left. Many came back: between 1871 and 1910, 116,107 people arrived from America, practically all of them Swedish-born.

Statistics Sweden, Mass emigration to America (2013), comparison figures 1851 to 1910.

Most emigrants came from the countryside: 928,197 of the 1,170,456. The counties are the historical ones; their borders are not those of today's regions.

Sources