Thursday, September 4, 2014

Help Me CrowdSource Dorothy's Denmark Question - Updated

I talked to Dorothy, one of my society colleagues, on the telephone today.  She is taking a genealogy trip to Norway Denmark at the end of September, and was frustrated by the information she has received so far through Internet searches, and a quote of over $100 per hour to do research onsite.  I listened and then tried to find information about how to do research for Denmark ancestors that migrated to the United States in the 1890 time frame.


Her second great-grandfather resided in Orum, Randers Amt (map below) in Denmark in the 1880 census (I think!), but may have been born in Viborg Amt.  When he migrated through Liverpool to Philadelphia, he left his family in Denmark and they migrated a year later.  Dorothy wondered if the family came out of Copenhagen or another European port.


I don't have any known Danish ancestry, but my grandsons do!  I have not done any research in Danish records, but have done some in Norwegian records online, on microfilm and in books with some success.  So I'm relatively uneducated about the topic.  But I know that there are church records on microfilm, and census records, and other records in repositories or online.

I went looking for Denmark genealogy resources on the Internet, and found a treasure trove of How-To articles and Helps for education, and specific information for the two Danish Amts in the FamilySearch Catalog.

I thought I would list some of my finds here, in hopes that my readers might be able to add more information or contacts to help Dorothy.

1)  FamilySearch Wiki page for Denmark:  https://familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/Denmark



Some pages are still incomplete.  The County pages have links to the parishes.


2)  FamilySearch Catalog page:  https://familysearch.org/catalog-search

Enter the country, county and town/parish into the "Place" field.  Some examples:




Check out the Church records, and any other records you might find.  All records are associated with a jurisdiction - country, county, town, parish, etc.  


Some English language books I found in the catalog included:





3)  Rootsweb Message Boards:  Search for a board:  http://boards.rootsweb.com/



*  Surname board for Norgaard:  http://boards.rootsweb.com/surnames.norgaard/mb.ashx

Search on each board for surnames and towns/parishes.

4)  Rootsweb Mailing Lists:





5)  FamilySearch Record Collections:  https://familysearch.org/search/collection/list

Put "denmark" in the "Filter by collection name" field on upper-left side of screen.  

6)  Sherry Stevens Denmark Family History Resources:  http://uvtagg.org/classes/DanishResources.pdf

7)  Cyndis List http://www.cyndislist.com/denmark/professionals/

8)  My Danish Roots site http://mydanishroots.info/

9)  Danish National Archiveshttp://www.sa.dk/content/us/genealogy

10)  Danish Family Search http://www.danishfamilysearch.com/

11)  Genealogy Research Denmarkhttp://aurelia.dis-danmark.dk/


13)  Denmark Genealogy Forumhttp://genforum.genealogy.com/denmark/

There are many more links found in a Google Search, including a number of professional researchers.  
I emailed Dorothy all of the above after an hour of searching.  I know I didn't find "everything," but it should provide a good start.

What other resources would you recommend for Dorothy to help her prepare for her trip to Denmark, and how to deal with the Archives and other repositories she may visit in Copenhagen, Randers and Viborg?  How could she possibly find cousins in Denmark while there?

UPDATED 3 p.m.:  I found some great videos on FamilySearch about Danish church records, and that some are digitized and online.  Here are links:



There are handouts in PDF for these.

The Arkivaliere Online site is in Danish, and you have to download a Java reader, but it works great.  I found Orum in Randers easily but didn't have a name or birth date for your ancestor to look for.  

The videos really help understand how all of this works.  

UPDATED  8 AM Friday:  I also corrected the Norway reference in the first paragraph...how did that happen?  My fingers don't always do what my brain thinks they should do!  Thanks, Howland!


copyright (c) 2014, Randall J. Seaver


6 comments:

Charles said...

Randy Check the Danish Emigration Archive which lists the emigrants that left Denmark through Copenhagen after about 1869. She needs to find the parish they lived in and then all the parish records are on microfilm at the Family Search Library in Salt Lake, births, marriages, deaths, census. They also had a military draft and ever 2- 3 years they list all the male children from birth till either they left Denmark or had their own male child.
Note I have a list of the parishes and how far back the parish records go at Family Search.

John K said...

I would recommend the Dansk Demografisk Database at http://ddd.dda.dk/ddd_en.htm It has indexes to various Danish censuses. Another good resource is the Danish Emigration Archives at http://www.emiarch.dk/search.php3?l=en

Charles said...

I forgot Family Search also has the Danish IGI online, if the name is not to common you might find the parish there also.

Linda Stufflebean said...

The Danish American Genealogy page on Facebook has Danes and Americans working together to find records. There seems to be a terrific success rate. Request to join and then post the query.

Lynn said...

http://www.danishfamilysearch.com/ (#10 that you mention) has digital photos of the church book pages for each parish (click on the parish on the map and follow from there). DDD is also a good source. And, yes, she may be able to find family in the area if the town is small enough -- I've done that myself and found cousins in Vejle Amt.

SallySearches said...

Randy and friend, Denmark has THE best records. Not to toot my own horn, but I wrote several (10?) blog posts last year about my searches for my husband's ancestors. Included are lots of screenshots.

Here is a link to everything I tagged Denmark. Hope it helps!

http://sallysearches.blogspot.com/search/label/Denmark