Swedish roots

Swedish rune-stones often contains genealogical info

During many years I have assisted lots of people to find and trace their Swedish roots. Most of this genealogical research have been traditional, using church-records and other written sources.
Today I am also using DNA as a useful and interesting tool. The possibilities with using DNA in genealogy are many and will probably become even more useful in the near future.

When it comes to Swedish roots and traditional research, it is often possible to go back in time about 350 years and then there are no more reliable sources to use. You may be "lucky" and find parts of your ancestry to be from a "famous" or noble family, letting you get some generations even further back in time, but that is rare and becomes very speculative in most cases.

The autosomal DNA-tests like FamilyFinder, is intended to use for close genealogy, about 5 generations or so. But we are many that have discovered that when it comes to Swedish roots, it is not unusual to find DNA matches that are way further back in time.
One explanation for this could be that Sweden is a small country and that we always have had a rather small population. "We are all related more or less with each other"...

Many people with Swedish roots, notice when looking at their ancestry some generations back, we find that some individual ancestors can be found several times and in several positions in the family tree.
It is estimated that in year 1650, Sweden had a total population less than 1 000 000 people.
So the last 350 years our population have grown to almost 9 500 000 and most of us will find some sort of genealogical connection with each other if we go back 7-10 generations.

This means that the foundation or base for our DNA is somewhat limited and that some parts of it have been able to survive recombination and "wash out" for much longer time than it would in more diverted populations.

This will probably make it possible for us to find out more about our ancestry as the database grows with more DNA-profiles every day. And maybe give us an chance to map parts of our Swedish ancestry perhaps 500 year or more back in time.

If you have Swedish roots and have taken a genealogical DNA-test, please consider to participate in the Sweden DNA project http://www.familytreedna.com/public/Sweden/

Allt för Sverige

A couple of days ago the second season of the very popular TV-show titled "Allt för Sverige" started.
The reality-show is called "The great Swedish Adventure" in USA and its about 10 Americans with Swedish heritage that are coming to Sweden and together experience Swedish history and culture along with having to compete for the chance to meet some of their living Swedish relatives and get to know more about their Swedish ancestry.

The show is not showed outside Sweden and that is a pity, since many Americans would probably appreciate the show. Perhaps it will be aired over there someday?

If you want to apply to participate in the show, there are some information about it here;
http://www.greatswedishadventure.com/

This seasons participants as seen on SVT website; http://www.svt.se/allt-for-sverige/

Allt för Sverige - season 2

 The show is very popular here in Sweden, even if some think that the competitive part of the show is unfair since every week one of the participants have to leave and go back home in USA. But they do get their ancestral info even if they loose.
I think the show is both interesting and fun to watch and its very exciting to follow their adventure in Sweden.


I have helped many Americans with Swedish ancestry to find out about their Swedish roots and I do recognize the emotional part that is seen on the show also on many of my clients.

Swedish DNA?

At this moment Family Tree DNA are doing an survey regarding ancestral origin of their Family Finder customers.
This is an attempt to expand and get more relevant information in to the Population Finder (admixture) results.

Today most Swedes that have taken the Family Finder autosomal DNA-test will have the result in Population Finder that they are "Orcadians", and perhaps some small amount of French ancestry that can be traced back to possible Walloonian heritage that some Swedes do have.

So the goal is to find a more suitable population then Orcadian to define a typical Swede. But are there any special Swedish population? Maybe it will be more natural to call it Scandinavian or Nordic or Vikings or something? I dont know, but it will be very interesting to follow what this process will end up in and what our new definition will be named.
Swedes and Norwegian people are pretty much the same will be my guess, and that perhaps also the Danes will get very close. The Finnish population is probably more related to eastern populations, but Sweden and Finland have been connected for a very long time, so this could be influenced of course.

Above is a view from my fathers ( a typical Swede) Population Finder result in FTDNA.
100 % Orcadian and many people have felt this not to be very informative.
Hopefully the detailed information now soon will be more relevant and detailed.

Indexing and cross-referencing

MyHeritage recently introduced their new SuperSearch technology and hopefully they will also sometime in the future include newspapers and other sources from Sweden. (and the whole world).

But is that a task that simply is to big to handle?

Here in Sweden, genealogy is not yet such big business as in USA and other parts of the world.
But many Swedes are interested in doing genealogical research. Our church-records are quite good (mostly) and free to use (at the archives).
Now these days most people want to have the sources available in digital media, and the most important sources are scanned and to access them you need to pay for the service. Thats OK with me, many people here battle and argument that also the digital sources should be free, claiming its a constitutional right.

Indexing are an interesting thing. Indexing takes the digital media one step further by enabling searching. And searching a database is of course a major, huge advantage compared to the search in going through the books manually.

But still, the technology of OCR (optical character recognition) and similar software are not yet able to scan/read and produce an output that is useful when it comes to old historical handwritten records. I am not even sure if this is something that is worked upon? But I hope it is.

Anyway, that means that indexing are still made by humans manually, which of course makes it time-consuming and expensive. And since not everyone that actually perform the actual indexing are experts in reading and understanding old handwritten documents, the results may be variable and unreliable in many degrees and ways.

There are alot of projects today involving indexing here in Sweden and I guess that is great. Some are very local and some are covering the whole country.

For example there are CDs available for the 1880, 1890, 1900, 1970, 1980 and 1990 census here in Sweden. These CDs are not reliable as a primary source, but great tools when it comes to locate someone that you lost track of.

There are also indexing projects ongoing for old Swedish newspapers. And there they try to use OCR-software (since printed media are more uniform and readable in general.) That works rather well, but not perfect. See an example from Swedish National Library (KB)

So when we finally have many indexed sources, the most important thing that needs to be established and developed is the possibility to do cross-referencing searches. And that I guess is exactly what MyHeritage´s SuperSearch is all about.
To be able to search for a person and that search will be able to retrieve and present all relevant information from all indexed sources, that will probably be one of the most important future feature in genealogy.

Will this ever happen? I don´t know, but it would be nice.
And if all these CDs could instead become online databases with possibilities to make needed corrections and additional input... Well then we are talking...

The future will be exciting in many ways when it comes to genealogy. DNA-testing is already here and will surely be a natural- and integrated part of traditional research.

Born in the USA

The first Swedes left for north America in early 1600s, they established a colony called "New Sweden" near the Delaware river. Its estimated that about 700-800 Swedes made the trip.
In 1655 this colony was overtaken by the Dutch, but people spoke Swedish there also more than 100 years later.

These early emigrants nobody really knows much about. Probably there are still some lineages with descendants that still are existing?

From the film "The Emigrants"

It was in mid 1800s that some Swedes again left for America. Mostly religious groups that wanted to be able to live a life they could not do here in Sweden, like "Bishop Hill".
After the civil war ended in USA and we here in Sweden struggled with several years of crop failure and bad harvests, many Swedes  started to flee the country and most did go to USA.

I truly recommend you all to see Jan Troell's 1971 film "The Emigrants"! Its a very realistic and moving story about a Swedish group of families emigrating to USA about 1850.

The film is based on the great books from our famous author Vilhelm Moberg. 



In 1865 there are about 25 000 Swedes living i USA, and 25 years later there are about 800 000!
In total about 1 300 000 Swedes left for USA this period, but nearly 20 % returned to Sweden again.

In the Swedish church records in the late 1800s and early 1900s, its not unusual to find farmers and other people that are noted to be born in USA;
In the Swedish census 1880 about 600 persons have their birthplace noted in USA or North America.
In 1890 census, the number was about 1500 and in the 1900 census it was about 3800.

Most of these was of course children to the returning emigrants.

But the majority did never return to Sweden again, and its said that in total there are more people living in USA with Swedish ancestry than the actual number of citizens living in Sweden today.
So I guess more than 10 000 000 Americans have Swedish roots!

And almost everyone here in Sweden do have many relatives in USA, some of them known, but actually most of us have lost track- and contact with our American relatives.

One of the best ways to actually find living relatives that you don´t know about is to do a genealogical DNA-test! I strongly recommend the Family Finder test from Family Tree DNA.

Use your DNA as bait!

We all have our own DNA, an unique mix that we got from our parents, that they got from their parents and so on...

This kind of DNA is called autosomal DNA and you can use it to try to find other relatives around the world.

Many Americans do have European ancestry and vice versa most Europeans do have American relatives.

In Sweden we are now starting to use DNA to find unknown, living relatives in USA. The way to do this is to use your own DNA as bait and then go fishing in the genetic pool!

And when you got someone "on the hook", a genetic match, you have a really good chance to find out in what way you are related since autosomal DNA dont go very deep. It is most useful for matching someone that have an shared ancestor within 5-6 generations.

This kind of DNA-testing is of course also useful for people that have been adopted or for other reasons dont have much knowledge about their ancestors, but if possible try to also have a traditional ancestral research ready to use when analyzing your results from the DNA-test.

A tip is to test all of your siblings to get a more powerful "bait" when fishing for relatives! You and your siblings most often get some DNA from your parents that you dont share with each other, due to random inheritance and recombination, and that is why you can get matches that your siblings dont match and vice versa. So its not a waste to let all family members take the Family Finder test, but of course its an economical matter since every test do cost money.

As an example, my mother and her brother share about 2740 cM of DNA, which indicates that they have most of their DNA shared with each other (identical twins share about 3380 cM).
Most of their matches are the same, but both my mother and her brother do have several matches that they dont share with each other. In this case, its most likely that my mothers brother got more DNA from his fathers mother and my mother got more from her fathers father.
I know this since I could confirm and assign a match to my mother ( a third cousin once removed) that was linked on her fathers fathers lineage. My uncle however did not have this match at all present in his DNA.

So please join the party, start using your DNA as a bait to find other relatives.  I can assure you that this is fun, interesting and very exciting!

Jussi Björling

One of Sweden´s most known and famous persons is Jussi Björling (Bjorling or Bjoerling often used outside Sweden). He was an opera-singer (tenor) with a unique and great voice.

His real name was Johan Jonatan and Jussi just a nickname that he got from his grandmother when he was a child.






Jussi (upper right) with his father and brothers.

Jussi was born 1911 in Dalarna and died 1960 in Stockholm. He was a singer already when he was 4 years old, and as a child he toured and performed all over USA together with his brothers and their father; David Björling. They performed under the name "The Bjoerling Male Quartet".

Later the brothers also became quite known and successful as singers, but Jussi became the real superstar and is still, more than 50 years after his death, considered as one of the best opera-singers in the world.



When I started out with genealogy in 1982 and was 16 years old, I had of course heard of Jussi Björling, even if I actually did not listen much to opera or that kind of music.

I guess the most famous song here in Sweden that we associate to Jussi is "Till havs" (here is a youtube video when he sings this in Swedish television 1953.)

After some years of genealogical research I found out that I actually was related to Jussi Björling. And as most genealogists I find it very exciting when finding a relative that are known since there are usually lots of pictures and documentation available.

My mother and Jussi Björling are 6th cousins and our common ancestor was the shoemaker Johan Parman (1673-1744).and his wife Katarina Waller (1700-1773).

Their daughters Anna and Maria both came to Voxna parish in Hälsingland and from them our lineage looks like this;

Jussí´s line;
Anna Parman (1725-1788) - Lars Norberg (1751-1827) - Margareta Norberg (1784-1864) - Lars Björn (1809-1896) - Lars Johan Björling (1842-1909) - Karl David Björling (1873-1926) - Johan Jonatan "Jussi" Björling (1911-1960)

My mother Agneta´s line;
Maria Parman (1730-1808) - Johannes Larsson (1762-?) - Stina Johansdotter (1803-1887) - Per Trygg (184-1916) - Sara Kristina Trygg (1874-1925) - Edit Svedlund (1915-2005) - Agneta (1948-)

The surname Björling came out of the surname Björn (Bear in Swedish) and as stories tell the name Björn was in this case worn by an extremely strong man and that this physical strength really was passed down his lineage. And Jussi was known also for his great physical strength, winning many matches of arm-wrestling...

Jussi Björling did not get old, only 49 years, but he most likely experienced more during this time than most of the rest of us ever will do. He had a serious problem with alcohol, but despite that he managed to perform and have a rather long career and made an impact in most countries in the world, and still does!

If you ever visit Sweden and Borlänge, please check out the "Jussi Björling Museum" they have there.