An estimated 1,127,518 people in the United States claim Danish descent. The Library of Congress has resources to help them trace their ancestry. Only a few of these resources can be named here. The Library has more than 125 books that focus on the subjects of Danes in the United States and Danish-Americans.
Local History and Genealogy Reference Services are available in the Researcher’s Entrance to the Main Reading Room (LJ-100). A Local History and Genealogy ready reference collection can also be found there. At the reference desk, one can request the folder on “Denmark—Genealogy” from the Local History and Genealogy Vertical File. The folder contains ephemera not otherwise found at the Library of Congress. Local History and Genealogy has also published a guide on Nordic and Scandinavian Emigration to the United States, which includes a page on Denmark Immigration, with lists of resources specific to that topic.
To use the Local History and Genealogy reference collection in the Main Reading Room, look for the door to Alcove 3/Deck 7. In this collection, a good place to start is Lee Douglas’ Danish Immigration to America: An Annotated Bibliography of Resources at the Library of Congress. Keep in mind that the Local History and Genealogy Reference Collection is intended primarily to enable research in United States local history and genealogy (for all ethnicities), rather than local history and genealogy outside of the United States. Research in the genealogy and local history of Denmark should begin with the Library of Congress Online Catalog, and with the resources in the European Reading Room. The Library of Congress collections hold over 800 books on genealogy in Denmark, as well as over 100 on Danish heraldry and nobility. A keyword search for "slaegtsbog" will turn up over 350 of these items. These books typically focus on the genealogy associated with one family name. In addition, more than 2,300 books pertain to Copenhagen and its history, and another 800 monographs focus on other cities, regions, and local history in Denmark.
The Library of Congress has over 150 books about Danes in the United States and Danish Americans. For those who read Danish, Danske i Amerika [Danish in America] is the classic text on the subject. This multi-author work was published in 1908 by Christian Rasmussen, who owned a large printing company and was heralded as the “Danish newspaper king” of the United States. The book chronicles the Danish presence in the Western Hemisphere, starting with Greenland and then the American continent, beginning with the explorer Jens Munk, who was sent to find the Northwest Passage to India. The book also tells of the Danish Moravians who settled in Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century. Other chapters in part 1 consider Danish participation in the Revolutionary War, the impact of Danish cultural icons on the United States in 19th century, and the importance of Danish American figures of the past. Part 2 surveys the contributions of Danes and Danish Americans to American music and to social and religious life, as well as their efforts in agriculture, dairy farming, and adult education up to around 1900.
The Library has many books on Denmark's ethnic groups, especially the largest minority, the Germans in southern Jutland (bordering Germany), but there are also books about Jews, Greenlanders, Icelanders, Swedes, etc.
