Page 24 - Family History

Miscellaneous

Danes in America

Danish Americans were unlike Americans of other Scandinavian descent, in
that while others congregated with their own countrymen, Danes spread

nationwide and comparatively quickly disappeared into the melting pot. The
disproportionate surplus of male immigrants caused many Danish men to
marry non-Danish women, and of all the Scandinavian immigrants the Danes
were the least cohesive group and the first to lose consciousness of their origins.
The mother tongue, too, experienced significant changes on the new continent.

Danish activity in America before the nineteenth-century includes Danes in the
Revolutionary War, and travelers to Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Lake
Michigan. The period between 1800 and 1840 includes seamen, artisans and
adventurers, but immigration in large numbers began in 1840, when the
Mormon Danes arrived.

While Norwegian emigration began in 1825 as a flight from religious
persecution and was followed by a mass migration of rural folk, Denmark's
laws were comparatively benign toward dissident sects and once the movement
began in the mid-nineteenth-century it included both rural and urban
emigrants. Indeed, religion was a relatively minor factor compared to the

increase in the birth rate and the economic difficulties of a small country faced
with a rapidly increasing population. Only Danish Mormons can be said to
have emigrated for religious reasons, and theirs was not a flight from
persecution so much as a gathering-in to "Zion" of co-religionists. Other Danish
religious life in America was characterized by the pervasive influence of the

Gruntvigian/Inner Mission schism, a phenomenon unique to the Danes, and
by familiar religious symbols brought from Denmark. After 1850, non-
Mormon emigrates were leaving Denmark primarily for economic reasons.

Reference:
http://www.loc.gov/rr/genealogy/bib_guid/danishamer.html

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