Explanations

First of all, check that your browser is set to display Swedish characters correctly. For more information, see the page on Swedish characters

Personal records
Pedigree charts
Names - see page Names and spelling
Places
What is a parish?
Farmers of all kinds
Swedish words and translations
Sources

Personal records

In the left frame of the database window you find a list of all persons entered in the database. Click on one of the names, and that person's record is displayed in the right frame. In the personal record, there are links to parents, spouse, and one child (your ancestor), but not to additional children, brothers or sisters, or other relatives. If you want to see what brothers and sisters a person has got, go to one of the parents to view the list of their children. The personal record contains a list of events, each of them with a note of the current date and place, plus source of information.

Many records are incomplete, and lack e.g. date of death (and birth) etc. Hopefully, I'll be able to add more information eventually. Also, exact dates and names may change when I confirm the information using another, more reliable, source. In some records the clergymen tried to cram too much information into too small a space, which of course makes it hard to read.

Pedigree charts

Use the links at the top to toggle between personal record and pedigree chart. Each person's parents are shown in two boxes to the right of the child's box. Their parents are shown in the next column and so on. Each name in the pedigree charts has a link to the record of that person.

Names

I put this information on a separate page, called Names and spelling.

Places

The name of a place is written <parish>, <county>, e.g. Mörlunda, Kalmar. In some cases I may write <address>, <parish>, <county>, where <address> may be a farm, a hamlet, a street address, or similar.

What is a parish?

My dictionary translates the Swedish word församling to parish. Parishes are a territorial division originating in the Middle Ages. Each parish in Sweden was served by one State church (in the Lutheran faith, since the 16th century). The State church handled registration of all births, deaths, marriages etc. up to 1991, when civil authorities took over. In the 19th century and earlier, all inhabitants in a parish were baptized, married, and buried at the same church.

A parish may be a small town and surrounding area, or a part of a large town, or a bunch of tiny villages in the countryside. The rule is simple - one church corresponds to one parish, and all land is part of some parish.

Farmers of all kinds

The Swedish words bonde or lantbrukare translate to farmer but the meaning of that note in the records may vary. It doesn't necessarily imply that he was farming his own land, he may have been a arrendator - i.e. a tenant farmer who payed rent for the land. If the occupation is given as torpare, it means that he was a tenant farmer paying for the land by doing several days work a year for the landowner. His wife and children probably had to do additional days. Torpare were poor people. They had to do so much work for the landowner that they were really pretty much like serfs and often had problem supporting themselves. I think an arrendator had a better situation, though of course an independent bonde was even better off.

Swedish words

If you see a line of Swedish text, with no explanation, it's just one of my notes for myself that's slipped through. Please try to ignore it. :-)

Sources

A source reference to a parish record may look like this: FB 1729-1800, Mörlunda, Kalmar. As you can see in the table below, FB is the abbreviation for the records of births and christenings. 1729-1800 is the time span covered by the current volume, Mörlunda is the parish and Kalmar the county. This gives enough information to identify the source in the National Archives. Sometimes I've been lazy and omitted the time span.