Free online records from Sweden

Sweden is not known for having free online records. You may have heard of Genline, a commercial Swedish Website with 17,453,462 online images comprising approximately 34,600,000 pages of images. This is a subscription site charging up to $285 US for a year subscription. However, you can also pay by the day, $11 US, or 20 days, a month, a quarter or three years. It is a fabulous Website for Swedish research. But they have the same records that were microfilmed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and are available on microfilm from the Family History Library.

Now there is an alternative, at least for the southern part of Sweden, the Demographical Database for Southern Sweden. DDSS. As they say on this also fabulous Website, "Our long-range aim is that all churchrecords concerning birth, marriage and death from Skåne, Blekinge and Halland will be registered and free of charge to search on the Internet. To a large extent the churchrecords covers the years 1650-1900." This site has 1,390,046 records in an extremely useful format with a very good search engine. The site is available in Swedish, English, German and Finnish. Quoting from the site,

The DDSS consists of three separate databases containing information extracted from the original Swedish parish church records of births and baptisms, weddings, deaths and burials. Each of these sets of records constitutes a separate database. It is important to know that the Swedish parishes were territorial and included every person living in the area. The databases do not cover the whole of Sweden, being limited to the counties of Sk�ne and Blekinge. So far only a small number of the records in the approximately 400 parishes in Sk�ne and Blekinge have been processed (see list of parishes for each database). However, the database is still increasing and new parishes are being added to the databases several times a year. The original records are from the 19th century or older and are kept at the Regional Archives in Lund. Each entry in the database includes a reference to the original, which in most cases also is available on microfiche from SVAR

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If you have a connection to Sweden, between the commercial site, Genline, and this wonderful DDSS, you will be able to spend a really long time looking at records.