Here we aim to briefly explain the history of the digitized archives of SweCarCol, as well as how they are described and organized.
Fonds suédois de Saint Barthélemy (FSB), Archives nationales d’outre-mer, Aix-en-Provence
The largest digitized archive in SweCarCol is the Fonds suédois de Saint Barthélemy (roughly The Swedish S:t Barthélemy collection) which is abbreviated FSB. The archive is kept in Archives nationales d’outre-mer (ANOM) in Aix-en-Provence, southern France. It contains 327 volumes, and when digitized roughly 176 000 images. FSB could be called the Swedish government archive originating from St Barthélemy. The history of the archive contains many stories and anecdotes, and the following description can only sum up its history. Within the literature referred to below, you can find an exhaustive account of the often quite complex turns of its past.
The documentation within FSB was created by the Swedish state on St Barthélemy during the period 1785–1878. The archive contains a few scattered documents from before and after the Swedish dominion, but principally, all holdings of the archive can be dated back to the Swedish administration of the colony. Within the treaty between Sweden and France which regulated the transfer of the colony, it was stipulated that the government archive would be left on the island, for the use of the new governance. The archive was thus kept in the so called Government House in Gustavia. St Barthélemy was under the administration of the larger island Guadeloupe, and in 1930, the Swedish documentation was transferred to the Guadeloupe archives. It is impossible to know to which degree the documents now kept in FSB actually corrrelates to those left on the island during the transfer of rule. One example of this precariousness is that when St Bartelemy's Swedish history started to garner interest from Sweden, during the early 1960's, more archival holdings were discovered in Gustavia (about 75 000 pages).