To do Genealogy

We hope that you will be interested about your roots as we are! Sometimes it can be like work for a detective and you never know what you will find !

Start interviewing your closest family members! One good start is to write down all information about your closest family, parents, siblings, grandparents.

How far back can you search?

Following is regarding Europe. If you have ancestors in Sweden and Finland you can nearly without any problems search back to the end of 1600.

If you have farmers in your family you can continue further back some hundred year. The time for records are to approx 1530, during this time we started to keep track of all farms and persons living at the farms and who kept the farm going. If you have relatives within the higher "layer" (nobility or royalty) you can come even further back in time.

Noble families had often relatives within the royal family, and due to this you can also search back to approx the year 600. At year 600 you can say that it ends, even thought some people in matter of fact have found people further back in time...

Why start with Genealogy? The interest to search your roots have increased the last years even thought we have been interested since school, year 1980. In 1983 when we went to school Genealogy could be choosen in school as a subject field. There were some students who choose Genealogy in school but not so many. We can happily inform you that some schools even have Genealogy on their schedule today. Pupils at Norra Reals upper secondary school in Stockholm can now choose this topic.

Today when the tempo is high and the development is fast people lose their grip about where they belong. In former times we lived together in two-three generations and we had the knowledge about where we came from. Today we also move faster and often and sometimes also far away in the world. Then we lose our verbal tradition and we know less about our closest relatives.

Maybe you will know more about your grandmothers mother, was she of nobel extraction ? or your grandfathers father, was he a simple soldier or maybe just a crofter. Can it be that you even have some "blue blood" and that you soon will have an invitatation to our Crown Princess wedding.

Which genes am I carrying around ? will I be old ? What did my relatives die of, which diseases etc? By finding your relatives you will find more facts than you know. The person you are today and will be tomorrow, then we think mostly about your physiological parts (as hart, lungs, brain and stomach). We also viewed a program on TV where they also informed that our genes hereditary characteristic are handed down from many generations and that it is even important how they lived, what kind of food the ate, if they had heavy duties or lived a life in luxury. Everything affect us.

You probably hava a lot of pictures in your possession that don´t have any notes at the backside (we have that). In a couple of years it is quite uninteresting to have a lot of pictures without any names. Take time on a weekend and visit your relativies, bring your photos or ask your relativies if they have any, then sit down and go through them and you will be pleased when you are done. You probably get both names and stories about your relativies to your collection.

Your relativies maybe also have some old letters in an old worn drawer that only will be brought out at family reunions or just when a person ask. Maybe you will find a letter from the US/Sweden with an address at the backside. Then you have found a goldmine (we found our relativies in Montana, that way). A tip - write a letter to the same address that you have found and see if some one answers.


Some thing else you can ask your relatives about are diaries, cuttings, calendars etc. In former times we took notes more than today (when there were no computers). (We found a date in a diary were our grandmother have written a date when a relative should travel to the US and got a name and date to look for in the passengerlists.)

Important when you start When you ask your relativies about information, ask in which parish they are born, in which county the belong to and of course their time of birth and all their names. (this information is when you start your research from Sweden). After this you have a lot of information to start searching for in the church records of different kind. (example: Parish, Torestorp in Älsvborgs county) Also decide on which side you shall start your research on - mothers father/mother or your fathers mother/father - because when you start you will have a lot of names to keep track on.