The Luck of the Draw

The luck of the draw! I’m using a poker metaphor (I think) for genealogy research.

This has never, ever happened to me before. I found my Swedish great-great-grandparents at the top of the first page of the first parish book I looked at this morning! That’s great-great grandfather Anders Larsson and family, in Björklund, Lindesberg, Örebro Län, Sweden, on the first page of the household examination book from 1861-1870. Right there in living black and white! (I’m excited. Can you tell I’m excited?)

I was searching the Sverige, kyrkböcker, 1451-1943 collection at Ancestry this morning. (BTW, thanks for buying Genline and saving me some money, Ancestry!). My search for a particular parish revealed 72 hits and there they were right at the top of the first book.

Also indispensible to Swedish genealogy research is ArkivDigital. This subscription site 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.

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.

Previously unreadable parish pages are now visible thanks to color scanning from ArkivDigital.