Welcome to the Rö website
his
website is devoted to the nature and history of Rö parish, some 30 miles north of Stockholm, Sweden. It
is the official website of Rö Local History Society.
For the benefit of our non-Swedish-speaking visitors, this page gives a short abstract
of the contents of the website. We don't think that it can interest very many
people outside Sweden, so we consider a site copy in English unnecessary. Should
you however find something you really would like to know what it means, please don't
hesitate to mail us. The address is info(at)rosocken.se.
The Swedish word "socken", here translated to parish, was the lowest level of both
church and civic administration for many centuries. Today the term is used by historians
and others as a geographic subdivision of the "kommun" outside the cities.
For you that are accustomed to the more usual English meaning of "parish" it is
important to know, that in Sweden all but a very few (there were roughly 2300 of
them) were territorial, i e each was defined by geographical borders, and
which parish you belonged to was determined by where you lived. In 1866 the close
connection between civic and church administration was dissolved, the civic "socken"
renamed to "kommun" and the church "socken" to "församling". Their names were usually
kept, but their borders did not always stay the same.
Today, of course, several different creeds and congregations exist outside the Swedish
Church; but in the times we are telling about there was no such thing - if you disagreed
on any point concerning religion, you'd better keep quiet about it to escape alive.
Rö is a still mainly rural parish first mentioned in the records towards the end
of the 13th century. Our present church is considered to have been built about the
same time, and its exterior has not been changed very much since then. The extent
of the parish is about 47 square kilometers (18 square miles).
In 2007 Björn and Ann Britt Bergström started a local history research project and
began publishing their results on the site. They also arranged excursions to interesting
places in the parish, set up information boards at those places, and lectured about
the history of the parish. These activities finally became a bit too extensive for
two people to manage alone, so on 15 september 2011 the local history society was
formally created.
The main menu has eleven items: Home, Society pages, Rö parish, Nature, Places,
People, Events, Documents, Pictures, Research and Archive.
Under the Home Page menu you find links to pages about the current weather, the
news archive, a guest book and more.
The society menu contains links to pages about the society, its activities, plans,
board, by-laws; and the pages for board and members only.
Under "Rö socken" you can read about the meaning of the parish name, a historical
overview, and how Rö gradually rose from the sea after the last ice age. There are
also links to the official list of ancient remains in Rö and to various modern and
old maps of the parish. There is also an essay about the patron saint of Rö church,
St. Olof, under this heading.
The Nature menu so far only contains a list of wild birds we have seen in Rö, and pictures
and descriptions of some 100 wild flowers found in Rö.
The Places section contains an extensive list of all place-names in Rö mentioned
before 1930, information about places that have been specially researched, information
signs set out at interesting locations, the economic history of Rö's manors, villages
and farms, and more.
The People section contains material intended for genealogists with ancestors who
lived in Rö as well as some pages of more general historic interest. The main feature
of this section is a database containing all person references found in archive
records available to us from the very earliest times. Until now, we have entered
more then 16,000 references, and the database is still growing.
A second database contains the entire 1920 census for Rö, another the 1930 census
and a fourth is a "census" of Rö's inhabitants in 1749, which we have reconstructed
from the church records. Under this section, you can also read about soldiers from
Rö and the regiments they served in; and the earliest available taxation rolls for
Rö. We are also working with family trees for families living in Rö in the 17th
and 18th centuries, and have so far published four. There are also a few items about
other subjects connected with genealogy.
The Events section contains a selection of interesting stories from the 17th to
the 20th century, some found in the Hundred Court Records, but also a few based
on our own research.
The Documents section is a collection of various historic documents concerning Rö,
including F W Radloff's and W Tham's descriptions of the parish from 1805
and 1850, respectively.
The Pictures section contains old and new pictures from Rö. The old pictures are
photos (and some artwork) of places, people and events in Rö; the new pictures are
recent photos from Rö, chosen mainly because they are attractive and/or interesting.
The Research section contains lists of archives where information about Rö can be
found, and is intended primarily for genealogists and local history researchers.
Under the heading Archive you find the web archive, which contains stories about
earlier events in the society. There are also some sundry items that don't fit in
elsewhere in the menu structure.
Of course, you can use Google Translate to get an idea of what each page contains,
but keep in mind that Google Translate sometimes fails utterly and produces hilarious
misrepresentations of the text!
Page first published 2009-10-29, latest update 2018-04-05.