Arkivdigital Swedish Records Free This Weekend – apologies for the short notice, but those of us researching in Sweden should take advantage of this offer.

ArkivDigital features online archives containing church books (parish records) from the 1600s to 1894 for all of Sweden (household examinations, moving in and out records, birth, marriage and death records). Also available are many of the modern church books (1895-1942), including congregation books,moving in and out records, birth, marriage and death records that are available within Swedish record privacy constraints.

This weekend access is free to all available records.

And for more posts on Swedish genealogy research, click here.

Check to see what church books are available for a parish by going to www.arkivdigital.net and click on the section image database. (Swedish law limits access to records from 1929 to 1950 because it falls within the current restrictions on information from the last 70 years.)

ArkivDigital improves on the records available from LDS microfilm (about 100 million pages from the Swedish archives) and the records available from the subscription-based Swedish National Archives (SVAR) because they are digitizing from the original primary source records. By contrast, during the 1990s and 2000s, both SVAR and Genline (acquired by Ancestry.com, now making 7.5 million Swedish records available through their World Explorer subscription) digitized the original LDS microfilms.

ArkivDigital states:

Many people think that the original books at the archives are as black-and-white images, and in many cases, unreadable as those images sometimes are. Fortunately that is not the case. It is the copies that are black and hard to read because the technology in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s was not as advanced as today and the copies have been transferred several times since then, making the digital images copies of copies of copies. [Because] ArkivDigital photographs the old unique source material[s] using modern technology, the readability is far superior to the old images.

The Swedish church books are usually the first Swedish records that one uses when tracing one’s Swedish roots. These records are a “gold mine” because they are so complete and contain such detailed information. In many cases, one can trace a person’s life in the church books from birth to death or birth to emigration.

ArkivDigital also offers the following tutorials, which can be useful when searching for your Swedish ancestors:

Arkivdigital Swedish Records Free this weekend is a great offer. Take it for a test drive and see if ArkivDigital is helpful to you in your Swedish research. Lycka till och glad sökning!