Thursday, August 3, 2017

ArkivDigital photographs Swedish-American church records .


When the Swedes emigrated to the United States and Canada, they often formed their own Swedish-speaking churches. The  oldest were founded in  the late 1840-thies and the beginning of the 1850-thies and the last in the 1920-thies  The largest congregation   was the lutheran Augustana synod . The most important of the others were the Evangelical  Covenant church  and ther were also Swedish baptist and Methodist congregations as well as the Evangelical Free church 

During the 1970-thies and 1980-thies, Lennart Setterdahl  was commissioned by the Swedish Emigrant Institute to microfilm much of the chrurchrecords . The microfilms  are currently available at the Swedish Emigrant Institute in Växjö and at the  Swenson Swedish Emigration Center at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois,
Last year, Arkivdigital began digitizing the Swedish-American church archives in several states to the delight of professsional and emigrant and family researchers. The digitization also includes material from some churches  that have not previously been filmed. In 2016, material from Kansas was digitized, This year,work on   digitizing materials from Minnesota and Nebraska has begun. ArkivDigital tells about the progress of their work at their blog


Warren Johnson and Sven Henning photographing
 Swedish-American church records
in Omaha Nebraska
 photo Arkivdigital