1700 Census of Males
The 1700 census of men in Denmark is not a well known document. It can be a key document for genealogists as the church records of Denmark often start in the late 1600s or early 1700s. This document can help genealogists better establish the earliest generation. Together with other documents of the 1600s, it can help genealogists extend a pedigree back beyond the earliest church records.
By order of 19 Oct 1700 a list was to be made of all men in Denmark (most lists seem to be dated December 1700 or January 1701). It included statistical columns listing a mark for age brackets over 18, 14-18, 10-14, 5-10, and 1-5 as a way of finding out how many men the government could count on in the case of a war. The 1700 census of men includes a listing of all men by household, giving the property appraisal (hartkorn), the name of the head, his age, all those men in his household, their relationships and occupations, and their ages. The 1700 census appears to have also been taken in Norway, Iceland, and other areas under Danish rule and many of these have been transcribed and published.
In the next few days I hope to scan in some images of the census so you can see what the original looks like.
From some searching in different parts of Denmark, it seems that the 1700 census of men has survived for perhaps half of the counties of Denmark. This project has the following aims:
- Identify all available 1700 census transcripts still available in Denmark.
- Make a transcription of all available lists and post them on the Internet for other researchers to be able to use.
- Perhaps make search engines which could search all of the names for an entire county and for as much of the country as can be found.
- Perhaps make images of the originals and link the indexes to the original images so a person can search a name and not only see the information, but look at the original online to compare.
This is going to take some time, effort, and money. Initially I have obtained copies of the 1700 census for three counties which I will be extracting and adding to this site in the near future. The next step would be to identify the other counties and then raise funds and perhaps volunteer help to extract and make these records available. I will be making a way to contact me for sharing information about these records and helping with the project in the future.
Here is what has been done so far. It isn't a lot, but its a start:
Åkær County (later part of Århus County)
For a paper copy of these extracts to the 1700 census you can send $30 for the Frederiksborg County, $20 for the Åkær County volume to Gary Horlacher, 4065 W. 3670 S., West Valley City, UT 84120. The books includes a wonderful place and name index (first and last name). The books are actually an excellent tool, especially with the index, making it in many ways even more useful than this Internet site. The money only covers the cost of publishing and postage. Cash is fine, especially from those oversees.
