English guide to accessing images of Danish censuses and church books at Arkivalieronline.dk

The Statens Arkiver is putting images of Danish censuses and church books online for anyone to use, free, at Arkivalieronline.dk. There are only a few instructions in English at the web site, so use this guide in addition to help you gain access to the images.

First, you must have

Logging In

You can login on the main Arkivalieronline.dk (AO) page. Type or copy-and-paste your email address and password in the upper right, and hit the Login button. The page will refresh, and under the Logout button, there should be a flashing note "Logget på som your-email-address," meaning logged in as you.

Viewing the Kirkebøger (Church Books), Step 1

Click on Kirkebøger (church books) in the upper left. After the new page loads, click on Søg i kirkebøger.

Viewing the Kirkebøger (Church Books), Step 2

Choose the Amt, Herred and Sogn from the dropdown menus. The page will refresh after each selection. You could simply go down the long list of sogne (786 parishes as of 23 May 06) and pick the one you want, but you risk getting one in a different district by the same name and miss having neighboring parishes in a handy list.

Viewing the Kirkebøger (Church Books), Step 3

Then a page with a table of sogn, herred, amt, tekst (links to images), fra, til, and F K V D J T A appears. Fra and til are the date ranges of the images, F=births, K=confirmations, V=marriages, D=deaths, J=register/index, T=moving-in lists, A=moving-out lists. Click on the highlighted Tekst link for the date range and record type you want.

Viewing the Kirkebøger (Church Books), Step 4

At this point I am unable to help since I have not been able to get the new LA View application to work properly on my machine.

To see images from another date range, click your browser's Back button, and you'll see the familiar table again. To change to another sogn, simply select another from the dropdown menu and a new table will load.

To switch to looking at censuses, click on Folketælling in the left menu and follow the instructions for censuses below.

Viewing the Folketællinger (Censuses), Step 1

Click Folketælling in the left menu. After the new page loads, click Søg i folketællinger again.

Viewing the Folketællinger (Censuses), Step 2

From the dropdown menus, choose the year (vælg årgang; 1787, 1801, 1834, 1840, 1845, 1850, 1855 and 1860 are available as of 23 May 06), choose the land division (vælg stedbetegnelse). Etaten=civil service and includes military companies, København=city of Copenhagen with the different quarters, Købstad=incorporated city such as Odense and Fredericia, Landsogn=parishes in the country. After choosing a land division, a new pop-up menu will appear, so choose from that whatever it is you are looking for. Then hit the Hent Oplysninger button.

Viewing the Folketællinger (Censuses), Step 3

At this point I am unable to help since I have not been able to get the new LA View application to work properly on my machine.

To look at images from another sogn, click your browser's Back button, and you'll see the familiar dowpdown menus again. Simply select another from the dropdown menu and a new set of images will load.

To switch to looking at church books, click on Søg i kirkebøger in the left menu and follow the instructions for church books above.

Logging Out

When you're done, please log out by clicking on Forside at the top of the left menu, and after you get back to the main home page, click on Logout. The page will refresh, and under the Logout button will be the notice Du er logget af (You are logged off). Logging off helps reduce the load on AO's server, reducing image load time.

Other Notes

Some censuses have been transcribed and made searchable in the Dansk Demografisk Database.

New images are added without advance notice, so check back frequently.

Images can be slow to load during the hours Danes are awake. After midnight and between about 6 and 9 am may also be slow due to massive downloads allowed between 12 and 9 am.

If you have further questions, post them to the Denmark mailing list, and be sure to mention the computer, operating system and web browser you are using when you describe the problem.