Sweden Population Registration Files

Europe Sweden  Population Registers


 * More information about: 1941 Population Registers

In Sweden, registration of the population journeys back hundreds of years. Registration began with the tax registrations, and then continuing on with the church registers and the household examinations. All of these records are ways in which the populace was organized. Initially, the registration was mostly for tax purposes. However, in present-day Sweden, many aspects of life are affected by the use of the modern population registration.

Information on one’s identity, family relationships, and residence are some of the basic questions for registration. If one has an ancestor or relative still in Sweden in the 20th century to the present, one can imagine how beneficial this record could be to one’s research.

In 1860, the church began sending their information on births, marriages and deaths to civil authorities. This truly is the beginning of the modern system. As time progressed, civil marriage records included the birth dates of the bride and groom (making them especially helpful when establishing a relationship.) in 1947, personal identification numbers were established as a means of keeping track of the populace. These numbers replaced the previous use of birth dates on the civil registration records.

100 years after the civil registration started, the records began to be computerized. Personal identification numbers became especially helpful during this period as a means of identifying each person in the country, especially when surnames were quite commonplace.

In the modern system of Population Registration, each person is given a "Personal Indentification Number," known as a Personnummer in Swedish. To learn more about this number, please see the referenced page.

The Tax Office (Skatteverket) is the current population keeping system.

Please see also: How to obtain a Personal Registration File.

Indexes to Stockholm City Population Registration [Register till Rotemanslängder]
Research use: The index provides a quick response to the question whether or not a particular family resided in Stockholm. These indexes, with the extracted information, are a key linking tool and often the only source of vital statistics in an area of great population mobility.

Record type: Indexes (including extracts of key information) of population registers. By 1860 the population of the city of Stockholm had become too complex for the church to administer through the Clerical Survey [Husförhörslängd] (see section 4.1.). The city taxing authorities responsible for the tax assessment lists (see section 4.4.) were directed to maintain a register of the entire population of Stockholm similar in scope to the clerical survey. The city was divided into 16 wards, each containing approximately 10,000 individuals. In 1926 when the system was discontinued the number of wards had increased to 36. Each ward (rote) was managed by a clerk or ward official [roteman], who kept track of each residence in his ward and its inhabitants in ledgers, regularly updating the population register. In these ledgers he recorded each person moving in and out of the property, with data on name, occupational title, birth date, birthplace, place moved from (and moved to) and also supplementary information regarding education, military service, medical care, poor relief and criminality among other things. Individuals were also normally recorded together with the household in which they were living, which in many cases makes it possible for a researcher to reconstruct households. The data on movements also makes it possible to track individuals and the way they moved from address to address in the city. The death certificates from the same period as the Roteman System are also registered. By linking the information on entries/persons in the Roteman System and the causes of death in the death certificates, the deaths can be analyzed in a social, demographic or geographical context. The actual population registers [Rotemanslängder] are restricted, but the Stockholm City Archive is extracting information from the registers and computerizing it. The resulting index is being offered to the Family History Department.

Time period: 1878 to 1926.

Contents: In sets corresponding to the established parishes of Stockholm, names are listed alphabetically by year regardless of the district in which a person lived; names, year of birth, and references to population register are given. They record all inhabitants with names, ages, places of origin, and the addresses where they relocated from and to.

Location: Stockholm City Archives in the section called the “Roteman archives.”

Population coverage: 99% of Stockholm City.

Reliability: Very good.