Clues in Emigration Records and Swedish Records
Hunting Your Swedish Roots—Searching for Clues in Emigration Records and Swedish Records
This article is the third in a series describing the hunt for one’s Swedish roots. Before jumping the pond, one must know a Swedish ancestor’s name, parish of origin in Sweden and a significant date such as a birth date or emigration date.
In the first article we discussed how to hunt for clues within your family and personal sources. In the second we discussed how to look at public records such as birth, death, census, obituaries and other types of public records to see how they might provide clues about an ancestor’s origin in Sweden. In this article, we will search for clues in the emigration records.
In 2005, The Swedish Emigrant Institute and the Swedish Genealogical Society published the CD, Emibas. This has probably been the most significant tool in helping many Swedish-Americans identify the parish their ancestor came from and also the Swedish name. Unfortunately, the CD is no longer being produced, but the contents of Emibas are now available on the subscription site: . Many libraries do have a copy of the CD.
Emibas is a CD with the names of 1.1 million people who left Sweden between 1845 and 1930 and is 75 percent complete. The original source for the database is the moving out (utflyttning) records from the church books. This tool is powerful because it is searchable by many paths such as birth date, emigration date, name, parish, county and other data.
Usually, when anyone asks me to find out where their ancestor came from in Sweden, Emibas is the first tool I use if they have a birth date, a name and an emigration date. The results of the search will include the emigrant’s birth information and where the person last lived in Sweden. Next it's time to jump the pond and begin searching in the Swedish church books.
While the CD is a powerful tool, one doesn’t always get immediate results. The CD does not contain the names of all emigrants since it is only 75 percent complete. If a name, birth or emigration date is incorrect, the search will not be helpful. Often one only has the American name which has been changed from the Swedish name.
I have been helping Annette, in Illinois, who asked me to find out from where in Sweden her grandmother, Alma Anderson, and grandfather, Bertel Johnson, emigrated. She gave me a copy of the couple’s marriage certificate that showed they married in Chicago on July 18, 1908. She mentioned that Bertel and Alma moved to Darien, Wisconsin and said Alma was born on December 3, 1880. I searched on the Emibas CD for Alma’s birth on and around that date but found nothing.
Looking for more clues, I began searching in the census and public records. Knowing the couple married in 1908, I began searching for an Alma Johnson and Bertel Johnson in the U.S. Census records on Ancestry.com. (Most public libraries subscribe to Ancestry.com). I tried an exact search on Alma Johnson with the following criteria: (1) birth year of 1880, (2) birth place of Sweden and (3) lived in Wisconsin. I found Alma on a 1910 U.S. Census living in Darien, Wisconsin. The record gave her age as being 30, birth place as Sweden, and her husband’s name Bert, his age shown as 25, born in Sweden. This was a correct record showing where the couple lived in 1910.
Then I decided to do some additional searches on Ancestry.com looking for Bert Johnson, and I found a naturalization record dated June 3, 1912 for Bertil Johnson living in Darien, Wisconsin, giving his birth date as March 11, 1885. I entered the birth date on the Emibas CD and I found a Gustav Bertil Johansson who emigrated from Sweden in 1903—many Swedes Americanized their surname and commonly used their middle names as their first names. You will note that the spelling on the marriage was Bertel and on the naturalization record was Bertil. The search result shows that he was born in Björkäng, Skaraborgs län (Västergötland) and emigrated—actually he received his moving out certificate from the parish minister—on February 6, 1903. His last place of residence in Sweden was Östergården, Fredsberg, Skaraborgs län (Västergötland). This record indicated that he was going to North America. This was the right person and now Annette can begin to search within the Swedish records to discover more about her grandfather’s family.
Finding Alma’s place of origin required more digging into American records and then searching within the Swedish census records which we will examine in the next article.
Many people also want to know the name of the ship on which an emigrant traveled. There will be another article on looking for ship records and how these can be helpful in identifying an ancestor's emigration date and place or origin.
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Genealogy|Släktforskning
Kathy Meade, one of North America’s top experts in the field of Swedish genealogy. She established Genline.com in North America but has since the company's sale to ancestry.com continued to help people find their Swedish roots in other ways. |