There are so many great Swedish genealogical websites to assist researchers, it can be difficult to keep up with all of them. Over the next few weeks I will feature some of my favorite research sites. Today I would like to look at Släktdata.
Släktdata is a non-profit association of volunteers who extract data from Swedish church records and make the data searchable and freely available to all researchers. This can be a huge help especially for those difficult to read older documents. This is not a word-for-word transcription but an extraction of the most vital pieces of information from each record. Obviously, an initiative like this will take years to complete, so you will find some Parishes have been heavily extracted, while others have not been touched.
The database contains extracts of:
- Births
- Marriages
- Deaths
- Household Examination Records
- Estate Inventories
- Moving In and Out Records
- Tax Records
- Court Records
The one slight difficulty for American researchers is that the site is entirely in Swedish. However, it is easy to use and easy to understand without too much effort. You can get to the database from the Homepage by clicking on the “Sök personer databasen” link.
This will open up the Search Screen.
From there you can either enter information in the search boxes or, and I would recommend this, you can select the Registerlista tab. The Registerlista is a list of all of the Parishes and collections of data that have been extracted so you can see if the Parish and time period you are looking for has been extracted. The Parishes are listed alphabetically.
Here for example you can see a number of birth (F), marriage (V), and death (D) volumes in Hagby Parish, Uppsalas Län have been extracted. So if you were looking for Hagby birth between 1768 and 1786, you would click on the magnifying glass with the plus in it, and a new screen opens.
From there click on the Excelformat link and an Excel file with all of the extracted birth data from Hagby from 1768 to 1786 will download to your computer. You can open, and search or copy the data as you would any Excel document. (If you do not have the program Excel, there are other free spreadsheet programs that can open this file or you can down.) There is a .txt file option, but that can be difficult to format and use.
The data on Släktdata is far from exhaustive for Sweden, but it is growing all the time. If you are lucking enough to be researching in one of the extracted Parishes it could save you a lot of time. Just one note, always remember to look at the original record. As I mentioned before, these are not transcripts, but extracts. Information-sometimes very important information-may not have been extracted.
Best of luck!