What they are and how they relate to genealogy research
Before you start doing Swedish research, it is helpful to have an understanding of the terms landskap and län. The first translates as province and the second as county, but even though they sometimes overlap in area and name (for example Värmland is a province and also a county), they are not the same thing. Also, you will sometimes see a province referred to online as an “historical” province, which makes it sound like they are a thing of the past. But in actuality they are just as alive today as they ever were.
The easy thing to understand is that provinces (landskap) define cultural regions, and counties (län) have administrative function (meaning they house the parish records which is what we as genealogists rely on). People in Sweden will rarely answer the question “where are you from” by naming a county, they will more likely refer to their province – think Värmland, Hälsingland, Småland, for example. The problem is that only one of those three is also a county name that will appear in the church books. Hälsingland and Småland are provinces only, and while those names appear on unofficial documents, obituaries, letters, occasionally on ship records, etc. they will never appear in the church books. Which leads to the question – if all you know is that your ancestor came from Hälsingland or Småland (as examples), which county will hold the records you are looking for?
This is where the Family Search Research Wiki is your best friend. It has a page for provinces https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Provinces_of_Sweden and for counties https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Counties_of_Sweden. If you open the pages in separate browser windows you can adjust the windows so the maps line up side by side. You will see that some of the provinces and counties overlap in name and area (for example Jämtland and Värmland), but many do not. Some of the counties administrate more than one province (Hälsingland and Gastrikland both belong to Gävleborg county), and some provinces encompass more than one county (Småland encompasses 3).
To further complicate matters, reforms done in 1997/98 restructured and renamed some of the counties. This does not affect lookups in genealogy websites like Ancestry, ArkivDigital, MyHeritage, FamilySearch, etc. but does affect lookups in Riksarkivet, the free records repository of the National Archives of Sweden. And you may run into these names in public family trees and some indexes.
If all of this sounds confusing, it is. That’s why I have created a cheat sheet with everything you need to know which can be downloaded here.
As examples, here is a list of a few of these confusing provinces, with the names of their corresponding county or counties. I am using the county names as they were before the 1997/98 reform. Those with a star are the ones that were affected by that change (see second list below). I have left off the appendage “län” as it is often omitted in practice.
- Skåne – Malmöhus*, Kristianstads*.
- Småland – Jönköping, Kronoberg, Kalmar
- Gastrikland and Hälsingland – Gävleborg
- Dalarna – Kopparberg * (name variation only)
- Västergötland – Skaraborg*, Älvsborg* (the city of Gothenburg, although in the province of Västergötland was administrated together with Bohuslän in the combined county Göteborg och Bohus)
- Bohuslän (despite the letters län in the name this is a province) – Göteborg och Bohus*
- Medelpad and Ångermanland – Västernorrland
For the following list of the restructured counties I am including län in the modern name to help differentiate between the old and new names.
- Kopparberg now Dalarnas län (name change only)
- Älvsborg, Skaraborg, Göteborg och Bohus – combined into new county Västra Götalands län (the province Västergötland still exists)
- Malmöhus, Kristianstad – now one county, Skåne län, making province name and county name synonymous.
Bottom line – you always need to know the name of the county to find church records in the archives, so know your counties!
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