What to do with Swedish Place Names

Hello Everyone! I hope you’re having a great week! I hope you’re having fun searching for your Scandinavian ancestors. I’m so grateful for the technology that we have at our fingertips and the innovation that continues to change how we search for our family. I’m so grateful for the hundreds of workers who scan and digitize all of these records so that they can help more people. I’m grateful for all of you who choose to spend your time finding your family instead of pursuing other things with your time. It means a lot! I believe it also means a lot to them! Keep up the good work.

Today, let’s talk about once you find your Swedish ancestor’s place name. If you remember, a place name is the name of the last residence that your ancestor lived in Sweden. Sometimes your ancestor will put their birth place on a record, which is gold for a genealogist. This article shows the process of how to get started with your Swedish research. So once you find that place name among your American records, then you need to go to FamilySearch.org/wiki to learn more.

County Page Name

So let’s take a closer look at a place name on FamilySearch. Here is a County page in Sweden. This is Varmland County. Remember, a county is bigger than a parish and a parish is bigger than a farm or city. So we are starting with the biggest and working our way down.

This shows a content list of the different topics that you’ll find on this page along with a map of Sweden showing where the county is located. This helps a lot when you’re trying to figure out where your ancestor came from.

This shows a lot of crucial information to learn about this county. This page is great because it has a lot of information. Some pages are not so detailed so we actually picked a good one to search.

This is where you find the Parish names. It shows a map and links to the individual parish pages on FamilySearch. This is probably the most important part of this page. There is other information on this page, but I’ll leave that up to you to learn about. Let’s move on to the Parish name page on FamilySearch.

Parish Page Name

This is where you will find the farm names. This is Boda Parish in Varmland County. If your ancestor put a farm name on any of the American records, this is where you will learn more about it. This is also a page that doesn’t have a lot of information on it. It has some links to other things, but no history of this parish.

From here you can jump over to the Swedish Digital Archives to find the original records. That’s what we’ll be talking about soon.

So I hope that you see how important looking at the FamilySearch place name pages are to your search. I also hope that I haven’t confused you even more with trying to be more detailed about these pages. I just want you to see the value that you have at your fingertips that many people don’t know exists. So try it out and see what you learn from these pages.

Good luck and happy hunting!

Tiffany