A genealogist’s gold mine digitised

The Palmskiöld Collection consists of a total of 500 volumes of unique documents from the 16th and 17th centuries, including a large number of copies of originals that were destroyed in the fire that gutted the royal Three Crowns Castle in Stockholm in 1697. To honour his friend Urban Sikeborg, a genealogist and Latin translator, on the occasion of his 60th birthday, Constantinus Lindfors contacted the University Library in October 2022 to order a digitised version of the genealogical part of the Palmskiöld Collection. This part consists of 62 volumes, Palmsk. Nos. 192–253, and deals with Swedish families.

I decided to donate funds to the Library to have this part of the collection digitised in honour of Urban, who has done so many good things for genealogy, and to make the collection accessible to many more people at the same time. It’s a fantastic tool for genealogy research. I see it as a cultural investment, which is an important thing, says Constantinus Lindfors.

Constantinus Lindfors’ great interest in genealogy began in lower secondary school with a school project about his own family, but it was in connection with his move to Stockholm that his interest really took off. He immersed himself in parish registers, found individuals he wanted to know more about and moved on to other types of source material. His interest has since grown steadily over the years to include other family trees and periods further back in time, until he eventually came across the Palmskiöld Collection.

I then became interested in the 16th century and the northern Swedish Blix family tree and found information about this family in the Palmskiöld Collection. The fact that there were so many records for this particular family could be due to the fact that Palmskiöld’s wife was a Blix family descendant. The collection contains a very large number of unique documents, with associated references to sources, which is unusual in genealogical contexts, says Constantinus Lindfors.

He then submitted an order for the document “Blix, Blixenstierna och Blixencrona” from Volume 195a to be digitised, and along with reading Olof Cronberg’s article “Palmskiöldska samlingen: En ofta förbisedd guldgruva” (the Palmskiöld Collection: An often-overlooked gold mine) from the 1998 yearbook of the Federation of Swedish Genealogical Societies, this was what sparked his donation for the digitisation.

For the University Library, this gift was the impetus for starting urgent conservation work with the material, which was in rather a sorry state. The collection is one of the most often requested and the documents in it suffer wear and tear every time people handle them physically.

Constantinus’ initiative was a very welcome one. The collection has long been on the list of materials that we wanted to digitise. His gift became a clear reason to prioritise the much-needed conservation of the material so that it could then be digitised. Now that the collection is protected from further wear and tear, and it also means that many interested genealogists can now avoid expensive and time-consuming trips to Uppsala, says Maria Berggren, head of the University Library’s Special Collections department.

Constantinus Lindfors himself has not stopped his own detective work in the archives, hoping that the work he is doing now will make it easier for those who come after him.

About the Palmskiöld Collection

In the early 18th century, Elias Palmskiöld was an archivist at the Swedish National Archive, but also a private collector of records, printed books and ephemera, and he made many copies. After his death, his collection was purchased in 1724 for Uppsala University Library. Read more about the collection in Alvin.