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Author: mdjonson1
Surnames:
Classification: queries
Message Board URL:
http://boards.rootsweb.com/surnames.carlson/1267.2.1/mb.ashx
Message Board Post:
Hi Marna -
The name of the parish in the records I sent is Ljusnarsberg - sorry I did not make that
clear before. It looks like the Swedish vowels did not come through properly - there
should be two dots over the first o in Örebro and there should be an a with two dots over
it between the V and the s in Västmanland. These are separate letters in Swedish along
with å (an a with a "ring" - small circle - over it) which come at the end of
the Swedish alphabet
The records are not too difficult to figure out even if you don't know Swedish. A lot
of the information is names, dates and places. Dates are pretty easy, since the names of
months in Swedish are very close to their names in English. One word of caution though:
Swedes normally write dates in a different order than we do. The Swedish order is
day-month-year or year-month-day, which you need to know when the month is represented by
a number. Names of persons are a little more difficult, but you will find that most of
the given names are very common, to the point where it can be difficult to know which Lars
Nilsson (to pick one out) is which. Names of places are more difficult, but on Genline,
at least, there are often indexes to place names in the Household Examination books which
can be useful in figuring out a difficult name. You may want to get a copy of the Swedish
Genealogical Dictionary by Phyllis Pladsen - it is very useful in reading the old records.
There wa!
s a spelling reform in Sweden in the early 1900's, so the modern dictionaries
won't usually have the old spellings. Some other useful books are Cradled in Sweden
by Carl-Erik Johansson and Your Swedish Roots by Kjell Andersson and Per Clemensson (this
last one is sort of a how-to book on using Genline).
Genline and SVAR each have their strengths and weaknesses. The most important difference
is that Genline has virtually all of the older records online, but does not have much of
anything after the 1890's. SVAR has many newer records, plus a fair number of the
older records (but not as many as Genline). I would say your choice depends on what
records you are most interested in. If you are mostly interested in going backwards to
find ancestors, Genline is the better choice right now. If you want to find living
relatives in Sweden, SVAR is probably better. However, Genline is planning to scan later
records, and SVAR continues to add more records to its site, so this is all subject to
change. There is also a third option, Arkiv Digital (
http://www.digiarkiv.se/), but they
have fewer records available than either SVAR or Genline, and their site is only in
Swedish at the moment, so its probably not the best for you. I haven't subscribed
there yet, so I don't have any first!
-hand experience with their system, but they claim that their images are easier to read
because they are filmed in color directly from the original church books. Both Genline
and SVAR are making their images from microfilm and microfiche copies of the original
records.
Hope this helps -
Mark Johnson
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