Review: Cradled in Sweden by Carl-Erik Johansson

The 1995 version of "Cradled in Sweden"

Cradled in Sweden by Carl-Erik Johansson, Everton Publishers, 2002, 345p.

            First published in 1972, Carl-Erik Johansson’s concise and comprehensive guide book has been long considered the bible of Swedish genealogical research. My own dog-eared and worn copy from 1995 is clearly an indispensable resource in my personal genealogy library.

            English-speaking researchers are sometimes wary of learning more about their Scandinavian ancestors because of the language barrier. Making sense of Swedish records, especially census or parish records, isn’t as difficult as one might imagine. Swedish, like English, is a Germanic language. Some of our words are shared or contain the same root elements. Additionally, earlier parish records are usually written in Latin. Typically, these records are presented in a uniform way across the parishes, which makes the extrapolation of information easier for the English speaker after learning just a few basic genealogy-related Swedish words.  Johansson provides a useful word list that contains Swedish and Latin expressions found in parish registers, census rolls, military records, court records, emigration files and other Swedish records of interest to genealogists. He also includes a handy visual letter guide to Gothic/ German Script, with examples of the most common given names written in this style.

            The initial chapters are devoted to providing the very basic, but absolutely essential background information required for conducting research into Swedish ancestry, specifically details about:  1) The Language, 2) The Country 3) The Names of Places and 4) The Names of Persons.  The author also devotes chapters to fixed and movable feast days, handwriting, and to the various repositories that house documents and information. The bulk of the book concerns itself with the description and details surrounding available records of interest to genealogists, including emigration, parish, clerical survey, census, land, court and military records.

            Helpful additions to the book are found in the appendices. Johansson provides a list of Swedish and Finnish army units, an index of companies and squadrons of Swedish army units in both regimental and alphabetical order, an alphabetical index of all parishes in Sweden, and of course, that handy Swedish word list.

            Now that the Riksarkivet.se (the website of the Swedish National Archives) has parish records and other important genealogical records digitized and available for free online, “Cradled in Sweden” is a great resource to help novice Swedish researchers fully understand and decipher these records.