Svenska Socknar - The parishes of Sweden

This database is not meant to be a comprehensive list of places in Sweden - rather, it is a finding aid for locating the historic parishes of Sweden on modern maps, and in relation to present day population centers.

There are two layouts - this one entitled Sources, and All Data which contains all the data!

Data has been compiled from two main sources so far:

• Cradled in Sweden, Carl-Erik Johansson, Everton Publishers, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1972 (= CIS in my notes)
• Gazetteer No.72 - Sweden, US Board on Geographic Names, 1963

There are eight text and four number fields:

1. The parish name before 1952
2. The parish name after 1952
3. The härad the parish belongs to
4. The län the parish belongs to
5. The date of the earliest extant parish register - primarily births, marriage, and death records
6. The date of the earliest extant husförhörslängder - a kind of clerical census
7. The designation of type of settlement the parish was in 1963
8. Notes by yours truly concerning making certain data fit
9. Degrees north of the Equator
10. Minutes north of the Equator
11. Degrees east of Greenwich
12. Minutes east of Greenwich

Generally, the fields for names before and after 1952, härad, län, and the dates of earliest record availability are from Cradled in Sweden - the source for this data is not explicitly mentioned in the book.

The designation, latitude, and longitude data are from the Gazetteer No. 72 - and apart from some obvious typographical errors, that data was extracted from Generalstabens karta över Sverige, various dates.

The designation is an abbreviation for the type of place - as determined by the US Board on Geographic Names. The Gazetteer has approx. 74,200 listings, many for lakes, mountains, etc., most of which will not be included here. Included will be many admd = administrative division, church, ppl = populated place, pplx = portion of ppl, farm, farms, estate, rstp = railroad stop, rstn = railroad station.

When merging the databases, attempt was made first to match the pre-1952 parish name to a place name in the gazetteer, and extract the designation and latitude/longitude data from that entry. If there was no match, the post-1952 name was tried. Some parish names (especially in large cities) were not found in the Gazetteer at all. Some parish names had multiple matches, in which case a populated place was chosen over an administrative district, on the supposition that a populated place was more likely than an administrative district to have been an historic parish. Exceptions to this rule were made for parishes shown as Lands and Stads - usually occurring in pairs; these were matched with gazetteer data on the assumption that the Stads were the 'populated places', and the Lands were larger outlying territories now considered 'administrative divisions'. Quite a few parishes had multiple matches as populated places in a given län, and an attempt was made to determine by proximity of the choices for pre-1952 matches to post-1952 matches which had most likely been the historic parish. Many parish names had multiple matches outside the correct län - some of which may well have been more populous. It is precisely to eliminate such false positives that this work was undertaken. A few parish names were matched with features such as lakes or islands, when the place name was obviously related, and the co-ordinates indicated proximity to the post-1952 name.

An x in the designation field indicates a parish name not found in the Gazetteer, but supposed by other evidence to be near the given location. These are generally parishes in the large cities such as Stockholm, Göteborg, and Eskilstuna.

These rules were invented by a non-Swedish speaking American map & genealogy enthusiast who has not yet set foot in Sweden, and therefore welcomes corrections...

Converted to HTML by Anders Andersson, <andersa@Update.UU.SE>