Sweden Civil Registration

Back to Sweden Portal Page►

Civil registration refers to vital records made by the government.

Beginning in 1860, the government required church ministers annually to copy the birth, marriage, and death information in their parish registers onto special forms and send them to the Statistiska Centralbyrån (SCB or Central Bureau of Statistics).

There are number of ways to locate these extracts. See “Church Records Extracts” in the "Church Records" section of this outline.

Civil authorities in Sweden did not begin registering their own, original vital statistics until 1950. And in 1991 the responsibility for keeping vital records was transferred to local tax offices (lokala skattemyndigheten).