How to find your Swedish Military Ancestor

Hello everyone! How has your week gone this week? Are you enjoying summer? I hope that whatever plans you have for summer you will take time to search for your ancestors. It’s a great summer project for the family as well.

I mentioned last week that I would show you how to search for an ancestor on the main Swedish military website this week. So that’s what we’ll be doing.

Begin Your Search

Remember that the first step in any Swedish searching is finding your ancestor’s Parish where he lived in the Old Country. The parish name can be found in church records, household examination records, or from family stories. Searching on Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org will help with American records if your search is starting with your immigrant ancestor. Otherwise, just use the parish where your family comes from.

Central Soldier Database

Next, you will take your ancestor’s name and parish and, military regiment if you found that on the Swedish records, to a Swedish military website. The website is called Central Soldier Database. Here is what it looks like on the homepage. You will have to change the language to English once you get there.

From here you just enter your ancestor’s information and see what you get. In my last post I mentioned how the soldiers had military names instead of their family names while they served. In this database, you’ll want to put your ancestor’s family name not his military name. I’m just going to pick Röke Parish and not put in a person’s name and see what I find.

Let’s click on the first person in this list and again see what information it has to offer.

As you can see, this page shows you Karl Anderberg, his birth year 1864, his enlistment year 1883, his regiment, his file number, his military company, his parish and croft number. This information is needed if you are going to find him in the Swedish records. Now you can go to the Swedish Digital Archives homepage and look him up in household examinations, church records, and original muster rolls.

Summary

Although military records don’t provide a wealth of genealogical information, they do help you know your ancestor better. You can research any wars he may have been in or follow him as he lived on the soldier’s croft given to him when he became a soldier.

For more information about Swedish military records go check out my other blog post here. Also, go ahead and look at any of the other Swedish and Norwegian posts that I’ve done so far. It’s interesting how many people have a mix of Scandinavian ancestors. So just because you found some Norwegian ancestors doesn’t mean you don’t have Swedish as well!

Good luck and happy hunting!

Tiffany

P.S. Feel free to contact me for a free 30 minute consultation if you’re still stuck. Just go to my contact page and email me. If you don’t have email, then go to my Facebook page and message me there. Good luck!