Swedish Church Jurisdictions for Family History Research

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Why Church Jurisdictions?
As you search for your Swedish ancestors, you will spend the majority of your time in the Swedish Lutheran Church Records. After all, they contain the household examination, birth, marriage, death, and moving records. But there are times when a parish record has gaps, was not well kept, or is even missing for the years you need. In situations like this, you may need to search the rest of the parish record collection (that was never microfilmed or digitized), or search records created by other church administration levels. This article will help you understand the administrative levels of the Swedish Lutheran Church. Knowing this will help you to identify the records to search.

Medieval - 1650's
To understand the administrative structure of the Swedish Lutheran church we need to look back to its origins. In the late 900’s, Roman Catholic Christianity was brought to the area that would become Sweden by people who had contact with Christians in other countries (although missionaries, and others had visited in the 800’s.) By the late 1,000’s the Christian belief was widely accepted with a gradual transition from the pagan beliefs. The first diocese in Sweden was Skara (with its first bishop in 1014.) It took another 150 years before Sweden had its own arch-diocese in Uppsala that was established in 1164 (yet still subordinate to Lund.) Until the middle of the 1100’s most bishops were from England or Germany which influenced how the church was organized. During the 1100 and 1200’s parishes, deaneries, diocese, arch-diocese, and the church province were created. At the same time monastic orders and convents were being established.

With the reformation, Sweden was no longer a church province after it broke away from the Roman Catholic Church at the Västerås riksdag of 1527. Even then, it was decided to keep the administrative structure of Parish (församling also called socken), Deanery (kontrakt), Diocese (stift), Arch-diocese and Cathedrals (ärkestift och domkapitel.)

1650's - early 1900's
The chart below represents the organizational structure of the Swedish State Church from the 1650's up to the early 1900's. See the table below the chart for English definitions and links for information about the records associated to each jurisdiction.



To print a copy of this chart with the definitions see:.