So, you have Swedish roots?

■  It is essential that you have enough information on your Swedes before you contact us, professional researchers or the Swedish archives. If you don’t have the necessary dates, you might waste your time and money, and ours too.

There are three major things you need to know:

1. Name

Also remember that patronymic surnames like Andersson, Johansson, Carlsson and Svensson are extremely common names, just as common as Smith, Jones and Brown in the US.

To read more about Swedish names, click here.

2. Place

The same goes if you have a location ending in the word län, as that is the word for county or counties.

A parish (församling, socken) is the smallest administrative unit in Sweden. This was the level the church records were kept on. A parish is a geographical area, and can contain several villages and individual farms.
There can be several parishes by the same name in the country, but they can usually be told apart by the province or län name.
For example: Tuna in Kalmar län, Tuna in Södermanland or Tuna in Medelpad.

To find places in Sweden, you can try the following gazetteer: Sveriges Nationalatlas.

Or you can try this link.

3. Date

Other helpful things

Date of emigration

The destination

How do I find all this?

But, first of all - talk to your family and relatives! They might have info you never dreamt of, like the family bible, grandpa's removal permit in Swedish, old letters and pictures from back home, etc.

Swedish Legal Records

By Elisabeth Thorsell
Professional genealogist, lecturer and writer

Swedish legal records are preserved from many levels in the legal system. The basic court is the Häradsrätten (District court) in rural areas and the basic legal unit was then the Härad (Legal District), which consists of a number of neighboring parishes.

The parish (socken, församling) is always the basic unit in all types of Swedish genealogical research. But what is a parish? A parish is a geographical area, the smallest administrative unit in Sweden. All people in the same parish went to the same church, were registered in the same books, and were buried in the same churchyard.

The District court judge was a university trained law graduate, but he also had the assistance of the nämndemännen (permanent jurymen), which were twelve local men of good repute. It was considered a big honor to be a nämndeman, and in many cases this honor was carried on in several generations of the same family.

The preserved records of the District courts usually start in the 1600s, and they are of many types. But two kinds are of special interest to genealogists, the domböcker (court minutes) and the bouppteckningar (estate inventories, probate).

The first common law of whole Sweden was written in the 1300s, Magnus Eriksson's Landslag, and that remained in use until 1734, when the new common law was instituted. Parts of that law have been in use until recently.

Here you can read about a court case in Småland in 1809, found in the minutes of the Sunnerbo District Court.

The bouppteckning (probate) had to be done for everyone who died and who possessed anything, as 1/8 % of the residue of the estate should be paid to the poor of the parish. However, it has been figured that only one in four had an estate inventory made, so you never know if you are going to find one. They are also important as they list all the heirs of the deceased, and if the children were minors, the next of kin that should guard their interests in the estate. If it was a man who died, the children's paternal uncle or somebody on that side of the family should be present, and if it was a woman, someone from her side of the family, and this can of course give important clues, if you do not know the origins of the deceased person.

Here you can read an example of how the bouppteckning helped to solve an old problem.

Where are these records?
They are kept in the Provincial archives in Sweden, and are also available on microfilm. The Mormon Family History Centers around the world have these microfilms in their catalog.

To find out which Legal District a parish belongs to, you must consult a gazetteer like Rosenberg's Statistiskt-Geografiskt Handlexikon, published originally in 1888, reprint 1993, or the yearly Rikets indelningar, published by the Central Bureau of Statistics. The boundaries of the Legal Districts (härader) have sometimes changed during the centuries, but usually not very much.

Swedish Roots
is published by Sveriges Släktforskarförbund.
The Federation of Swedish Genealogical Societie

Our ancestors and the Tax man 

Ever since Sweden became the country it is today and perhaps even earlier, taxes have been a burden for the people. Originally taxes were levied only on farm-owners, while the nobility and the clergy were exempt from taxes.

Taxes in the old times were not paid in cash. Instead they were paid in kind, for example in butter and flour in the province of Västergötland, in iron in the mining regions of Bergslagen and even in dried pike in the province of Ångermanland. In addition the taxpayers had to put in so many days of labor at the nearest royal estate. Gradually, however, taxes came to be paid in cash.

Just as we have it today, taxes in past centuries were of different kinds. The farmer not only had to pay the yearly fee (årliga räntan) which also was called the base tax (grundskatten), which was levied on the means of his subsistence – the land – but he also had to pay a tithe (10 %) on everything he harvested. In the beginning of this century these taxes were changed and were called income taxes and a tax on one´s wealth (förmögenhetskatt).

Tax lists are very important to genealogists. They reveal much how our ancestors lived, the milieu in which they moved and in many ways they complement the material to be found in the parish records.

Real property deed books since the 16th Century
In order to be sure that all taxes were paid the Swedish Government had to keep strict records. Deed books for all farms which paid taxes are preserved all the way back to the 16th century and since 1630s tax lists (mantalslängder) have been made up for all persons in a taxable category.

In 1571 and 1613 Sweden levied a special tax in order to redeem the fortress of Älvsborg, near Göteborg, on Sweden´s west coast, which the Danes in their frequent wars with Sweden had captured and had held for ransom. Our oldest tax lists cover these two special assessments.

Some notes on the Swedish language
By Nils William Olsson, Ph.D., F.A.S.G.

The Swedish language is a part and parcel of the Indo-European languages, stretching from India to Europe and through migration to the U.S., Canada, Mexico and South America. The language is a part of the North Germanic languages and is identified as an East Scandinavian variant together with Danish. The west branch includes Norwegian and Icelandic.

The main difference between these two Scandinavian branches is that Swedish and Danish have no diphthongs, or at least a very few. Thus the word for stone in Swedish and Danish is sten, whereas in Norwegian and Icelandic it is stein. The same thing is true for the word for bone – in Swedish it is ben, in Norwegian it is bein. There are other differences, but I don't wish to become technical.
A few diphthongs can be found in Swedish. Thus a parish is Skåne is Raus and the name of the month of August is Augusti. The man's name of August is often pronounced Agust in the vernacular, showing how Swedes avoid diphthongs if at all possible.
Curiously the Swede has no problem with the word for no, which is nej, nor for the popular forms for dig and mig (you and me), which are pronunced dej and mej. The Swedish word for pie is paj, where the English sound has been preserved and the Swedish word for the month of May is maj.

Though Finland is usually considered to be a part of Scandinavia so far as its culture and democratic forms are concerned, its language has nothing to do with the Indo-European languages, but belongs to the Finno-Ugric language family, which is believed somehow to be related to Hungarian and Turkish. The Finnish language is rich in vowels and diphthongs but poor in consonants.

The Swedish Alphabet

Swedish has an alphabet which is very much like the English alphabet,with the notable exception that Swedish has three additional vowels, coming at the end of the alphabet – å, ä and ö. I shall return to these in a moment. On another respect the Swedes have almost totally eliminated the letter q. In older spellings this letter was followed by a v, much like in English, where q is followed by u. Thus before the spelling reform of 1906 the word for woman was qvinna, today the q has been replaced by the letter k, thus kvinna. The same thing happened to the words for mill = qvarn; twig = qvist and qvick = quick. In the case of proper names, however, there is a tendency to retain the old spelling, thus Qvarnström, Qvist, Qvick, Qvarfordt, etc.

Another letter, w, has been supplanted by v, and is no longer in the alphabet. However, it is often retained in surnames, sometimes to make the names seem more esoteric. Thus Wall, Wallgren, Wallenberg, Wikström, etc.

Often an H is slipped into a name, for no other reason but to make the name more unusual, thus we have surnames like Wahlgren, Dahlgren, Dahlstrand, Ohlsson, Pehrsson, Lundh, Strandh, etc.

Before the spelling reform in 1906 certain place names in Sweden had a silent H in the beginning of the name. This letter has now been eliminated. The more notorious place names are Hvetlanda in Småland, today Vetlanda; Hvalinge in Halland; Hvalstad in Västergötland, Hvena in Småland, Hvilan in Skåne, all today spelled without the h, thus Valinge, Valstad,Vena and Vilan. Be sure to check your place name in Rosenberg's gazetteer,*) before giving up.

One more of the spelling reforms of 1906 which might occasion you grief is the substitution of v for f in certain words, where f comes at the end of the syllable, such as löf, meaning leaf, which today is spelled löv. It is particularly common in surnames beginning with Löf-, such as Löfberg, Löfgren, Löfquist, Löfstrand, etc., where in translation the surname is always written with Lof- as the first syllable. For place names check out Rosenberg for spellings of Löfsätra, Löfsta, Löfstad, Löfvestad, Löfånger, Löfåsen, etc. A letter which is used infrequently is the letter c. It is found mostly in foreign loan words, such as ceder, cell, cement, center, check, cigarr, cirkel, cirkus, citron, civil, cykel, cylinder and cypress.

Let us now look at three extra vowels, å, ä and ö [Å, Ä and Ö] which appear at the end of the Swedish alphabet. I am not going to bore you with the history of these sounds, or how they came into being. The thing to remember is that they are separate letters and cannot under any circumstance be equated with a or o. They are just as important as other letters and must not be ignored. Ignoring the diacritical marks can spell failure for you in your research. As an example I can mention two parishes in Malmöhus län – one is Bosarp, the other is Bösarp.

It makes a world of difference in your research if you don't watch out for those diacritical marks. It is just as important as crossing a t, by not doing so, you are stuck with an 1.

*) Rosenberg referenced above is the work Geografiskt statistiskt handlexikon öfver Sverige by Carl Martin Rosenberg. First published in 1882, and reprinted last in 1993 by Sveriges Släktforskarförbund. This is the best gazetteer of old Sweden, most farms, all parishes, legal districts (härad) and geographical areas are listed here.

Emigrant Traffic on the North Sea
 

By Nils William Olsson

Americans of Swedish descent, whose ancestors made the long journey from Sweden to America, find the Swedish emigration phenomenon divided roughly into three time periods. These periods correspond roughly to (a) the early emigration era, i.e. up to the 1850s and 1860s, (b) - the middle period, which saw the culmination of emigration, and (c) - the period just prior to and after the First World War.

The first period coincided with the sailing ship era, when Swedish sailing vessels from Göteborg, Stockholm and the Norrland ports of Gävle and Söderhamn, ferried passengers the entire distance from Sweden to America. With few exceptions, the Swedish emigrants who left Sweden during the period 1820-1860, went the entire distance on Swedish or foreign vessels.

The second period begins with the advent of the improved and more dependable steamship, the acceleration of emigrant traffic and the need for speedier communications across the Atlantic.

This was the time when the journey was split into two segments - the first being the trip across the North Sea from Copenhagen, Göteborg or the Danish port of Esbjerg, located on the west coast of Jutland, directly to Hull on the east coast of England. From Hull the transportation of thousands of emigrants was carried out via the railway to Liverpool, where the giant British transoceanic steamships were tied up, waiting to receive their human cargoes. Despite the inconvenience of splitting the journey, the time saved was enormous and emigrants could now, hopefully, make the westward journey in much shorter time. It is true that many emigrants, particularly from southern Sweden, found it preferable to travel to Germany and then via Hamburg or Bremen travel the long journey across the North Atlantic. It is estimated that roughly 15% of the Swedish emigrants chose this method.

The third epoch begins in the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century, when the Thingvalla Line out of Copenhagen, later to be renamed the Scandinavian American Line and later, in 1915, the Swedish American Line out of Göteborg, were able to offer direct and speedy transatlantic service aboard modern and comfortable steamships.

It is the middle period, however, which chiefly interests us, for this is the period which more than the two other, involved the majority of the Swedish emigrants who sought a new life style in the West.

Steamships to England

The hope of inaugurating regular steamship traffic between Sweden and England still remained, however. In 1840 the British firm of Wilson, Hudson & Co., situated in Hull opened traffic between Hull and Göteborg with two leased steamers, the Glen Albyn and the Innisfail. These were in turn replaced by two other vessels, the Scotia and the Express. Also this second attempt failed, after only two years.

It was during these two years, however, that despite the paucity of passengers, something happened which was to create an entirely different situation. On board the Innisfail, which arrived in Göteborg from Hull on 19 Aug. 1842 was a Swedish passenger, who was returning to Sweden, after a grand tour, which had included a visit to the United States. He was Robert Rettig, the son of the Swedish tobacco tycoon in Gävle, Per Christian Rettig. On the journey across the North Sea young Rettig had made the acquaintance of an Englishman, David Wilson, a son of the ship's owner in Hull, Thomas Wilson. Robert Rettig brought David Wilson and his brother John West Wilson to Gävle, where both spent some time studying Swedish and pursuing mercantile studies.

On 1 Dec. 1843, John West Wilson, then but 28 years old, founded in Göteborg the shipping firm of J. W. Wilson, which today under the name of Wilson & Co. still carries on the business of shipping and freight forwarding. His father, Thomas Wilson in Hull, owned the head firm in that city, and thus father and son could conduct a transit traffic across the North Sea to the mutual satisfaction of both. In Göteborg, John West Wilson established a thriving business in exporting to England - oats, cattle and Swedish wood products, importing to Sweden coal for the infant but growing Swedish industry.

It was not until 1848 that a new attempt was made to establish regular steamship service between Göteborg and Hull. Despite.the former failures, many things had changed, not least the burgeoning emigrant traffic and the recent discovery of gold in California. Plans advanced slowly. Wilson suggested a contract with the Swedish Government that he would carry all mail free of charge, if the Government would waive all port charges in Sweden and Norway. After two years Wilson finally had his contract and on 29 June 1850 the first steamer Courier arrived in Göteborg with several passengers on board.

After that a vessel departed from Göteborg every fortnight, touching at the port of Kristiansand in south Norway en route. In the beginning the service ran into some difficulties, particularly the cholera epidemic, which again forced vessels to go into Känsö Quarantine for long periods of time. In March of 1851, however, the first World's Fair was opened in London and traffic began picking up.

The first tariffs were announced. The round trip between Göteborg and Hull in first class commanded a price of seven pounds, in second class it was four pounds. The railway journey from Hull to London was a little more than a pound.

More steamships

The emigration to America, which during the 1840s had begun to develop at a modest rate, began in the 1850s to accelerate beyond the wildest dreams. The English steamship lines began building bigger and faster ships in order to compete with the sailing vessel traffic. Here the steamships could offer the speed which shrank the time consumed on the Atlantic run from period of eight, ten and up to twelve weeks to an average of a fortnight. John West Wilson saw the opportunities and began negotiating with the British Atlantic lines to coordinate the traffic by sending passengers to Hull, then by rail to Liverpool, the giant departure port for all of the British Isles, as well as part of the European continent. Wilson thus inaugurated a service which was to continue uninterruptedly up to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914.

Thus the Oscar, a spanking new propeller driven steamship, measuring 700 ton and built in 1853, was able to sail for Hull from Göteborg 19 May 1854, carrying 120 emigrants. In June of the same year the Oscar carried no less than 350 Swedish emigrants. At that time there were no less than 1,500 individuals from various parts of Sweden lodged in Göteborg, waiting for space to cross the North Sea and the Atlantic. As the emigration grew, so did also the Wilson Line. At times it was necessary to bring over extra steamers from Hull to cope with the immense traffic. Among these temporary vessels, which aided the emigration effort, were such ships as the Baltic, Humber, Propeller, Hamburg, Neva, North Sea, Kingston, Hawk, Jupiter, St. George, Arctic and many others.

In 1859 the Wilson Line added a new vessel, the Arctic, which measured close to 700 tons. Increased emigration forced the line to acquire two new and modern steamships, the Argo, measuring 716 tons and which could carry 282 passengers and the Pacific, which measured 688 tons and could handle 302 passengers. Soon another vessel, the Hero, measuring 985 tons joined the traffic and made the crossing over the North Sea in the record time of 39 hours. Argo and Oder, the latter measuring 694 tons, were to be the regular steamships which plied the North Sea continually through the 1850s and 1860s. The number of passengers increased. By 1865 the Wilson ships averaged between 170 and 200 passengers on each journey and on one journey alone, the Argo was filled to capacity with 300 passengers. The emigration scene in Göteborg on those days when the vessels left for Hull was one of excitement, confusion, anticipation as well as sadness. The Göteborgs Handels - och Sjöfartstidning carried a story on 26 Aug. 1865, which paints the scene as seen by the newspaper's reporter:

"Every week we witness larger and smaller groups of peasants from almost every province in Sweden, who have arrived here, ostensibly to travel with the large British steamships to the New World. The entire deck is covered with chests and bed clothes. The motivating drive for making this journey is the fact that relatives in America have written letters, telling of how good life is over there. Thus one sells house and land in order to make the journey.

Down in the harbor, where the Hull steamer Argo is docked there is life and activity. The deck has to be cleared before departure, and now everybody is working desperately to stow the baggage. The emigrants are to be quartered on the middle deck. The cargo consists of sawn timber and between the cargo and the deck there is enough room, so that one or two hundred persons can lodge here comfortably. Along the sides of the vessel are provisional seats, which also may be used for a head rest for those who wish to sleep. Here, also, the bed clothes are spread ready for the night's rest.

The large hatchway provides the room with light and fresh air. Even around the engines, emigrants have made themselves comfortable. Boys and girls, mothers with babies, still nursing, young and old, every class of humanity is represented here. The family fathers are attempting to cheer up their families, telling them to keep up their courage. The women seem passive. The Word of God is on their lips and with tearful eyes and anxiety in their hearts they attempt to sing a religious hymn in their solemn meditation. The men busy themselves seeing that everything is in order. They then settle down around a sea chest, take out their provisions of pork, meat, butter, cheese and bread. They are loquacious and freely dispense the one 'for the road.'

Now the signal is given and the departure is at hand. Now the situation changes. Friends and relatives leave the ship. The passengers gather along the railing for the last look at the city. Now the engines start up and there is unrest on board, weeping, moaning, crying and shrieking is heard. Many of the passengers change their moods as they soberly reminisce about their homes and life in their native land. 'Farewell, dear Sweden' is the cry one hears from many lips. Soon one can see nothing of the Argo in the beautiful September (read August) evening but the pillar of smoke streaking across the horizon.'

Greater hordes of emigrants made it necessary to build larger and more commodious vessels. In 1866 a new Hero arrived in Göteborg (the old one had been sold to Australia). It measured 1,034 tons and could carry 550 passengers. The Argo was replaced with the Albion, which measured 1,066 tons. But it was in the late 1860s and the 1870s that the Wilson Line really increased its carrying capacity. Two ships, the Orlando and the Rollo were built in Hull 1869-1870 and measured the unheard-of size of 1,500 tons and could carry from 800 to 900 passengers. These vessels served the emigrant trade for many years and thousands and thousands of Swedish emigrants began their journeys to the United States aboard one of these two sturdy vessels. In 1881 another vessel, the Romeo, measuring 1,855 tons, replaced the Rollo. The Ariosto, measuring 2,376 tons, the largest ship which at that time called at Göteborg regularly was added in 1890. In later years two other Wilson ships were added to the Göteborg-Hull run. These were the Calypso, measuring 2,876 tons, built in 1904 and the Eskimo, built in 1910, measuring 3,326 tons.

As mentioned earlier, the outbreak of World War I brought an abrupt end to the emigrant traffic between Göteborg and Hull. When the war was over it was the Swedish American Line that was to take over as the transportation medium for Swedes wishing to migrate. But that is another chapter.

For thousands of Americans, who have heard their parents and grandparents speak about their first chapter of their odyssey to the New World, names like the Orlando, the Rollo, the Romeo and the Ariosto evoke a nostalgia which is difficult to describe. These were the ships that furnished the first break in the link that tied them to their native land.

First published in the Swedish American Genealogist 1984, December issue.

Swedish Roots
is published by Sveriges Släktforskarförbund.
Editor: Elisabeth Thorsell.
Last updated on 10 September 2001

Some Notes on Swedish Names

By Nils William Olsson, Ph.D., F.A.S.G.
 

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