This blog post was updated in July 2024 due to the Danish Emigration Archives' implementation of a new website.
The Danish Emigration Archives provides a free index of the Copenhagen Police Emigrant Registers from 1868 to 1920. In this blog post, I explain how to search the index. I hope my tips will make it easier for you to find your Danish emigrant ancestor.
The Copenhagen Police Emigrant Registers
The Copenhagen Police kept the emigrant registers as a part of their audit of Danish travel agents from 1868 to 1952. The audit only covered overseas emigrants who bought a ticket from a Danish agent. In some cases, this means that your ancestor's emigration was not recorded by the Copenhagen Police.
A man may have emigrated on his own first and later bought tickets for the rest of the family from an agent in the United States. If the man bought his own ticket from a Danish agent, he should be listed, but the wife and children are not listed if their tickets were bought from a foreign agent. The same sometimes happened when a man emigrated and bought tickets for his brothers or sisters later.
Therefore, not all Danish emigrants are in the registers or the database. Anyhow, it's free to use, so why not give it a try?
Udvandrerprotokollen: Index of Emigrants from 1868 to 1920
In Danish, the emigrant registers are called udvandrerprotokoller. Volunteers continue to expand the index that currently covers registers for 1868-1911, 1913-16, and 1919-20. You can see the available year by clicking within the Fra field in the search form.
The search form is available here: https://www.aalborgstadsarkiv.dk/UA.asp?UA=UAProtokol
The search form consists of ten fields. I have added translations to the screenshot below.
Some things are good to know about this search form before you begin:
- Danes can only have one surname. If your ancestor had two or more names that seem like surnames to you, it doesn't matter: In Denmark, only the last name counts as a surname. All other names, including middle names, are treated as given names.
- You cannot use the percentage sign % as a wildcard for one or more characters within a name and at the beginning and end of a name.
- You cannot request a precise search by adding quotation marks.
Example: The Emigrant Hans Thomsen from Tved
Let's look at an example. I want to find Hans Thomsen, who was born on 10 May 1871 in Tved Parish, Svendborg County, and emigrated to the United States when he was in his early twenties.
When searching for hans Thomsen who last resided in Tved, I got two search results, as shown in the snippet below.
Most of the information should be understandable by looking at my translation of the search form above, but I have a few comments:
- Udvandrerens fulde Navn means the emigrant's full name.
- Alder means age.
- Forevisningsdato means the date of presentation. That is the date the agent showed the contact to the police, and they listed the emigrant in the register. The date is shown in the format month/day/year. That date was usually the day of departure or a couple of days before the departure.
- The first column lists the type of emigration. Indirekte (indirect) means that he did not sail from Copenhagen, but from a foreign port. Unfortunately, neither the ship name nor the port of departure was recorded in the original register of indirect emigrants. For direkte (direct) passengers who sailed from Copenhagen, the name of the ship is listed below the word Direkte, as shown for Hans Thomsen from Tved.
- I have not yet seen any search results with any place name listed in the birthplace column, so I recommend that you do not use the birthplace search term.
Never Trust an Index – Always Check the Original Record
I have only discovered a few transcription errors in this index, but still, I highly recommend checking the original register. For each search result there is a link to the image collection. It is the tiny book icon to the left of the emigrant's name. To learn how to find your ancestor in the original emigrant register, see the next blog post in this series.
Source References:
The image at the top of the post: Carl [Emil] Baagøe, "Udvandrerskibet 'Otttawa' forlader Kjøbenhavn paa dets første Reise til New-York" [The immigrant ship "Ottawa" leaves Copenhagen on its first trip to New York]; image, the Royal Danish Library, Digital collections (http://www5.kb.dk/images/billed/2010/okt/billeder/object398197/en?id=%2Fimages%2Fbilled%2F2010%2Fokt%2Fbilleder%2Fobject398197 : accessed 15 September 2023). It was reportedly painted or printed on 19 August 1866.
