Swedish Genealogy Records & Resources Online

This week’s Friday records post is all about Swedish genealogy! Findmypast has added 12 million Swedish records to their international collection, and we’ll show you other resources for accessing similar records. We’ll also highlight some past unique collections for Sweden, and you can explore expert research tips from a professional genealogist. 

Featured: Swedish Genealogy Records Online

June 6 is the National Day of Sweden, which honors two historical events: Gustav Vasa being elected king on June 6, 1523, and the adoption of a new constitution on June 6, 1809. After decades of discussion, the Swedish parliament finally voted to make June 6 a public holiday. And we can’t think of a better way to observe than to spend time researching your Swedish ancestors!

As Findmypast continues to grow their international records database, they’ve highlighted the recent addition of Swedish records to their collection. Over 12 million Swedish baptisms, marriages, and burials are now dating back to 1611 are now available to search on Findmypast. These records will also generate hints against your Findmypast family tree.

Their Swedish collection consist of the following indexes:

If you’re a Findmypast subscriber, head over there now to explore these indexed records. If you’re not a Findmypast subscriber, you can explore select Swedish baptisms, burials, and marriages at Ancestry.com. You can also find select Swedish baptisms, burials, and marriages at FamilySearch.org for free.

Unique Swedish Genealogy Resources

Swedish Newspapers. A couple of years back we highlighted the Minnesota Historical Society’s collection of Swedish-American newspapers. They are available through an online portal. Users can explore more than 300,000 pages from 28 different Swedish-American newspaper titles published across the U.S. between 1859 and 2007. The portal is available in Swedish and English and includes a keyword search.

Biographies of notable Swedish women. The Chicago Evening Post reported on a new online biographical dictionary of women in Swedish history. The site itself is Svenskt kvinnobiografiskt lexicon (it does have an English-language home page). The home page encourages visitors to “Read up on 1,000 Swedish women from the Middle Ages to the present day. Use the search function to reveal what these women got up to, how they were educated, which organisations they belonged to, where they travelled, what they achieved, and much more. All of them contributed in a significant way to the development of Swedish society.” According to the Chicago Evening Post, the current collection of 1,000 biographical sketches will soon double (at least)

Expert Swedish Genealogy Research Tips

Swedish genealogy can be daunting. Many people avoid Swedish research because they don’t speak the language and because the names change every generation–like from Ole Olsson to Ole Nilsson to Nils Pehrrson. Despite these barriers, Swedish research can be relatively simple, fun, and successful! In a special guest article, Paul Woodbury, a Senior Genealogist with Legacy Tree Genealogists, shares the following 5 things to keep in mind when researching your Swedish ancestors:

  1. You can “read” many records without reading Swedish.
  2. Family events are summarized in Swedish clerical examinations.
  3. Many Swedish records cross-reference each other.
  4. You can trouble-shoot record gaps.
  5. There are some excellent Swedish indexes and databases online.

Paul covers these 5 points in-depth in this special article. Click here to read it now!

Beginning-swedish-genealogy-family England Wales electoral registers

Lisa Louise Cooke Author

About the Author: Lisa Louise Cooke is the producer and host of the Genealogy Gems Podcast, an online genealogy audio show and app. She is the author of the books The Genealogist’s Google ToolboxMobile GenealogyHow to Find Your Family History in Newspapers, and the Google Earth for Genealogy video series. She is an international keynote speaker and the Vice President of the Genealogical Speakers Guild.

 

Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links and Genealogy Gems will be compensated if you make a purchase after clicking on these links (at no additional cost to you). Thank you for supporting Genealogy Gems!

Google Scholar and ProQuest Team Up!

This just in! Google Scholar and ProQuest are teaming up to provide a publicly-accessible index to all of ProQuest’s scholarly journal content. Google Scholar already delivers search results on your favorite genealogy keywords (names, places and records) from scholarly publications like dissertations, academic articles and more. (Click here to read my blog post about Google Scholar for genealogy.)

Now the search experience will become more powerful and inclusive. According to a press release, “ProQuest will enable the full text of its scholarly journal content to be indexed in Google Scholar, improving research outcomes. Work is underway and the company anticipates that by the third-quarter of 2015, users starting their research in Google Scholar will be able to access scholarly content via ProQuest.”

“ProQuest has rich, vast content that advances the work of researchers, scholars and students,” blogged the CEO of ProQuest. “Respecting the different ways researchers and librarians choose to conduct their research is essential to ensuring that content is simple to discover and use. We know Google Scholar is a popular starting point for researchers of all kinds. Our teamwork with Google will enable these patrons to be automatically recognized as authenticated ProQuest users and seamlessly link to their ProQuest collections, where they can connect with full-text scholarly content.”

It appears that there will still be a charge to access copyright-protected material (“authenticated ProQuest users” in the quote above are those that have access via a ProQuest subscription). According to the press release, “Users who are not recognized will be sent to a landing page with the abstract or an image of the first page, protecting all rights holders. To read full text, the users will authenticate themselves. There is nothing for libraries to set up – the linking will be seamless and automatic.”

Genealogists Google Toolbox 2nd edition coverLearn more about using Google Scholar and other advance Google search techniques to discover your family history online in The Genealogist’s Google Toolbox Second Edition. The newly-updated and fully-revised book is available now!

Can Google Help Me Search Digitized Newspaper Pages?

my ancestor in the newspaper newsCan Google help you search digitized newspapers you find online? Recently I heard from Garth in Ontario, Canada with a question like that. Here’s what he asked and here’s what I told him:

“A friend found a digitized newspaper article by clicking on this link and going through various years–very time consuming! I’m thinking there has to be a better way with Google, but no luck. I think I have used most of your techniques from Genealogy Gems. Would appreciate any hints.”

genealogy gems podcast mailboxFirst of all, thanks to Garth for alerting us to an online local archive of Canadian newspapers, The Clarington Local Newspapers collection. I like making people aware of collections like this. Here’s what I told him:

If the website had text transcriptions of articles then Google would have easily been able to grab the phrase “Arthur Levi Brunt” off any page. The search would be “Arthur Levi Brunt”  or, even better, would be a site search, which would be formatted like this: site:http://vitacollections.ca/claringtonnews “Arthur Levi Brunt.” In Google site searches, you start with the word “site” with a colon, followed by the home page in which to search, followed by the exact phrase you want to search in quotes.

However, the Clarington Digital News website relies on its own built-in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to spot and retrieve search terms on the digitized newspaper images. Google doesn’t have access to their OCR, and can’t apply OCR itself to images on the web (the pages on this site are images, not pdfs). So in this case, Google would not be able to locate the same article.

I did notice in looking at the Clarington News site that there is a search box, so your friend didn’t need to browse through the years looking for article on Arthur. Simply entering his name in site’s search box instantly brought up the relevant list in seconds. Here’s a link to that search, so you can see for yourself. Perhaps a few of the other newspaper articles found in that search will be of interest to your friend as well!

Genealogists Google Toolbox 2nd edition coverLearn more about Google search strategies (Google site search is just one!) in my newly-revised, hot off the press 2nd edition of The Genealogist’s Google Toolbox, Second Edition. So many genealogy gems like these news articles are buried online: you just need to know how to harness the power of Google’s FREE tools to find them!

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