Interested in using ArchivDigital Sweden to find Swedish ancestors?

On Wednesday, I was fortunate to be in the audience for the Legacy webinar with Kathleen Meade entitled, “Research Your Swedish Ancestors in Living Color Using ArkivDigital Online.”

There were so many helpful tips for using ArchivDigital Sweden that after this webinar, a one-year subscription seemed well worth the cost to me. Using ArchivDigital Sweden image database offers

about 190 000 historical books, documents and records or 56 million digital color images of Swedish church records, estate inventories, court records, tax/census records and other historical records. We use modern technology to digitalize the records directly from the original books and we extend the image database with more than 600,000 color images each month.

Using ArchivDigital Sweden

Using ArkivDigital Sweden is a snap via an online subscription service called ArkivDigital online, which provides online access to the entire image database for a specific period of time. Download the Coverage Table here . You can also search their database by county and parish name, district name, record type, etc. Search results are improved when using Swedish spelling and diacritical marks when searching, e.g. Örebro rathr than Orebro.

At right is the baptism record for my 6g-grandmother Brÿta Olofsdotter, born 12 May 1701, in Wångtorp, Lindesberg, Örebro Län, Sweden and found using ArchivDigital Sweden.

There were several great tips in Kathy Meade’s webinar, including:

  • Look for a pastorat where records may be gathered for more than one parish
  • Search for a list of contents by record type and page number at the beginning of each digitized volume
  • Find changes in year/record type when only Image numbers are given, as opposed to when both Image/Page numbers are listed.

Research Your Swedish Ancestors in Living Color Using ArkivDigital is available online to view for free until 16 Sep 2015. After that, it’s available to Legacy Webinar subscribers only.