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SWEDISH HISTORY

Viking silver treasure uncovered outside Stockholm

A thousand-year-old silver hoard -- including eight "extraordinarily well-preserved" neck rings -- has been found during the excavation of a Viking-era hamlet in a Stockholm suburb.

Published: 10 November 2022 16:13 CET

Viking silver treasure uncovered outside Stockholm

Some of the coins and necklaces found at the dig in Viggbyholm. Photo: The Archaeologists, NHM

The treasure was found during the archeological excavation of a Viking Age settlement in Viggbyholm, Täby, in an area thought to have been inhabited between about 400 AD, through the Viking Age (800–1050 AD), and into the early Middle Ages. The archeologists have found more than 20 houses and buildings at the site.

“This is something you probably only experience once in a lifetime”, said Maria Lingström at The Archaeologists, National Historical Museums, in Sweden, in a press release.

Archeologists at the dig found the coin buried under what was once the wooden floor in a building, with silver coins stored in a pouch made of linen, which, together with the jewellery, was stored in a small ceramic pot.

“When I started to carefully remove the neck rings one by one, I had this extraordinary feeling of ‘they just keep coming and coming’,” Lingström said.

In total there were eight high quality torque-style neck rings, two arm rings, one ring, two pearls and 12 coin pendants (coins used as jewellery) in the pot.

The archaeologist John Hamilton said it remained unclear why people had buried some of their most valuable objects underground in this case.

“One common interpretation is that people hid and buried their treasures in difficult and tumultuous times,” he said. “We have yet to see if that was the case here.”

The coins are yet more evidence of the extensive trading relations which flourished in Viking Age Scandinavia. There are coins in the pouch from England, Bohemia and Bavaria, as well as five Arabic coins called dirhams.

One of the European coins is extremely rare and was minted in the city of Rouen, in Normandy, France.

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A lot of people around the world, in particular North America to where hundreds of thousands of Swedes emigrated in the 18th and 19th century, have Swedish ancestors (turns out Taylor Swift may or may not be among them).

This article will take you through the basic steps of researching your family tree in Sweden.

Let’s concentrate on Sweden’s church books, which are by far your most useful resource. From the 17th century, priests were obliged to keep records on the residents in their parish, the main census bureau at the time, and Swedes do really love keeping records.

The best part is that these have all been digitised and are freely available from the National Archives of Sweden – the bulk of them online, and some even searchable, so you can look through them wherever you are in the world.

There are five main “books” that make up your key sources:

First, household examination records (husförhörslängder). Sweden today is very secular, but a few hundred years ago the Lutheran church was very powerful.

Parish priests between 1686 and the late 19th century used to visit their parishioners to quiz them on their knowledge of the Bible, literacy and knowledge of Luther’s Small Catechism – and mark them on their answers.

These visits were also an opportunity to make any updates to the official population records, so as outdated as they may seem today, as much of a goldmine are they for genealogy researchers.

The other four useful books are: lists of everyone who moved to and from a parish (inflyttnings- och utflyttningslängder), birth and christening records (födelse- och dopböcker), marriage records (lysnings- och vigselböcker), and finally the records of all deaths and funerals (död- och begravningsböcker).

So how do you go about tracking down a Swedish ancestor?

If you already know their name, date of birth or where in Sweden they were last registered as living, that goes a long way. But say you don’t have specific details, what can you then do?

I’m not a genealogy expert, so I will take you through this the way I would go about it.

Let’s try to track down my great, great grandfather on my father’s side.

From left, the article author, her father, great grandfather and grandfather. Photo: Private

You probably, like me, know your grandfather’s name. Chances are you probably also have some idea of roughly where and when they were born, even if you, like me, don’t know the specific year.

(I’m starting with my grandfather, but maybe your first Sweden-born ancestor was one of your great grandparents or even further back – hopefully you’ll find this imperfect example useful anyway)

In my case, I happen to know that my grandfather’s full name was Emil Verner Löfgren and that he was born in the region of Östergötland but spent most of his adult years in Blekinge.

But I don’t know his date of birth or death, which would help me track him down in the church books.

I start by going to the Swedish National Archives’ online search function and simply type in his name.

Helpfully, you can search in English, and in the screenshot below you can see some of the top results that come up: entries from the census, and old shipping rolls.

When I click on his name, I get enough information about him and his family that I can tell that it all adds up and I’ve found the right Emil Löfgren.

Screenshot: Swedish National Archives

Now, I got lucky. Emil spent a few years at sea in his youth, so he’s listed in the shipping rolls. They helpfully tell me his exact date of birth and his parents’ names, so I’ve already come a long way just by doing a quick online search.

In case you’re not as lucky, let’s pretend for the sake of this article that I only found him in the census. That tells me at least two crucial details: his year of birth and where he was born.

Screenshot: Swedish National Archives

It’s time now to abandon the online search and get digging through the church books, which conveniently are also online, but require you to search them manually. If you didn’t find your ancestor in the online search, you’ll have to go straight to the church books.

I want to find out Emil’s exact date of birth, so I go to the church archives on the National Archives’ homepage and search for Karlshamn.

I now get a long list of all the available church records from Karlshamn, but in this case I want the parish register from 1930 (församlingsbok – before 1895-ish known as the house examination book) where the above information tells me I can find Emil.

Helpfully, it also tells me exactly on which page of the parish register to look, so I track down the book and turn to page 2624.

Screenshot: Swedish National Archives

The screenshot above tells me Emil’s name (Verner is here spelled with a W – you may find spelling variations of the same person’s name, especially if your ancestor changed their name from, say, Karl/Carl to Charles), his profession, his exact date of birth, place of birth, that he’s been vaccinated against the smallpox, date of marriage and where he last appeared in the church books (under inflyttad eller överförd).

The last bit is helpful if I want to trace every step of Emil’s life, as it tells me that his previous entry was on page 3720 in the previous edition of the parish register from Karlshamn (where it says “G.b.” – meaning gamla boken, “old book”). But that’s not what I want to do right now.

Instead, I want to know the name of his father. I know that he was born on September 9th, 1884, in Ringarum.

Let’s go to the church books of Ringarum…

I now instead look for the birth and christening records (födelse- och dopböcker) from the year 1884. Because I have his date of birth, it’s relatively easy to flick through the pages and find him (note that births are listed in a rough, but not always exact, order). Even if you only have the year of birth, you may still find them this way, but it will take you longer as you’ll have to go through the whole year.

Screenshot: Swedish National Archives

So the above screenshot tells me when Emil was born, christened, and the names of his parents: Adolf Werner Löfgren Gåse (they’ve included his professional title at the time, a boatsman, båtsman, in the Swedish Navy) and Emma Charlotta Eriksdotter.

It also tells me where they were living at the time (a croft called Gåstorp) and, supremely helpfully, exactly what page to find them on in the house examination records (page 163), so that’s our next stop.

And just like that, I have Adolf’s date and parish of birth (Mogata, September 8th, 1858 – see the screenshot below), as well as the year he married (May 22nd, 1884, which mathematically skilled readers will note was, er, not more than nine months before Emil was born).

On the right, you also see his and his wife’s marks from the house examination sessions, i.e. their reading abilities and how well they know their Bible and Luther.

Screenshot: Swedish National Archives

If I were to take a closer look at Adolf’s life, it would tell me that after he retired as a boatsman, he worked as a shoemaker. His parents died when he was very young, so he was sold at a “child auction” – a way of boarding out orphans and poor children in 19th century Sweden.

At these auctions, the child was handed over to the lowest bidder – whoever was willing to provide for the child for the least money from the authorities. The foster parent was compensated by the state with an amount equal to the bid in return for providing the child with housing, food and education. How good a home they provided varied hugely and in some cases it was a way of acquiring cheap child labour.

But what I want to find out for the purpose of this article is the name of Adolf’s father, so I just repeat some of the steps above.

I now search for the church records for Mogata parish, and use Adolf’s date of birth to find him in the birth records.

The priest’s handwriting is getting harder and harder to read, but I can still make out the names of Adolf’s parents (föräldrar). His father was shoemaker Erik Johan Löfgren and mother Sofia Ulrika Nilsdotter. Also listed are his godparents (faddrar).

Screenshot: Swedish National Archives

So there you go. I’ve now found what I set out to: the name of my great, great grandfather.

If I were to go even further back, I would probably notice that Erik Johan was the first man in the family to hold the surname Löfgren.

Most Swedes before or around this time used patronymics. This is where surnames such as Andersson and Svensson come from; they originally literally meant “son of Anders” and “son of Svensson”, so every new son got his surname after his father. This changed in the 18th or early 19th century, when people either took a new name (like Löfgren) or started passing their old -son name to the next generation.

You’ll notice that for example Erik Johan’s wife held the surname Nilsdotter. This is because her father’s name was Nils.

I’ve now taken you through the easiest and cheapest way of tracing your Swedish ancestry. But you may hit stumbling blocks along the way. For example, it’s not uncommon for children a few hundred years ago to have been born out of wedlock with no official father listed.

There are plenty of other free and paid-for sites that could help you. Some of these are the Swedish genealogy forum Rötter, subscription sites such as Ancestry, My Heritage and the database Sveriges dödbok (literally: Sweden’s death book, searchable records of deaths and burials, which a lot of genealogy researchers swear by), and various Facebook groups (search for släktforskning – family research).

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