A German colony in Jutland: the evidence of Christian names Birgit EGGERT 1. Introduction Frederiks Sogn (Frederik’s Parish) in the middle of the Danish penin- sula Jutland has a very special history. The parish was established in 1760 and inhabited by German immigrants. The concentration of for- eigners in this parish came to light in an investigation I made in 2009 of the most common Christian names among Danish peasants around the year 1800 (Eggert 2009). At that time approximately 80 % of the total population in Denmark bore one of the ten most common feminine names or one of the ten most common masculine names, and when I mapped the five most common feminine names and the five most common masculine names, a white patch emerged. The map is shown in figure 1; Frederik’s Parish is accentuated with a circle. The white patch corresponds to Frederik’s Parish, and this means that in this particular parish we should find a very different usage of names from elsewhere in Denmark. This matter aroused my curiosity and inspired me to carry out the present survey. I was curious to know two things: which names were used in that case? And did this difference remain evident in Frederik’s Parish generation after generation? 2. Historical background In 1760, invited by King Frederik V, a group of 300 families came to Denmark from the south of Germany, mainly from the Electorate Pfalz and the county Hessen-Darmstadt (Andersen 1980: 62 ff.). Uninhabited sandy moorlands in Jutland needed to be cultivated and the German immigrants were offered a number of inducements to settle there. However, the land was barren and life hard: half of the immigrants had left Denmark by 1763 and after five years only 59 families remained (Nielsen & Bitsch-Larsen 1984: 32). Onoma 46 (2011), 53-75. doi: 10.2143/ONO.46.0.2975529. © Onoma. All rights reserved. 996190_ONOMA_46_02.indd6190_ONOMA_46_02.indd 5353 224/04/134/04/13 114:364:36 54 BIRGIT EGGERT Figure 1. The distribution of the five most frequent feminine names and the five most frequent masculine names in the 1801 census. The different shades give information about the frequency of the ten names in percentages of the total population. Map: Peder Dam 2008 (first published in Eggert 2009: 119). Frederik’s Parish is accentuated with a circle. Popularly speaking these German immigrants are referred to as “kartoffeltyskere” (potato Germans) because they were among the first people in Denmark to grow potatoes on a large scale. The potato was the most important crop for the immigrants because it gave the best yield on the barren lands. They used the potatoes to feed their animals and to sell in the market towns, and potatoes formed an impor- tant part of their own diet. Growing potatoes in the late 18th century, the German immigrants had an economic advantage over the Danish peasants who had not yet come to believe in this strange new crop (Folke Ax 2008: 48-49). Most of the German immigrants settled in a single parish, Frederik’s Parish, while the rest settled in other places on the sandy moorlands 996190_ONOMA_46_02.indd6190_ONOMA_46_02.indd 5454 224/04/134/04/13 114:364:36 A GERMAN COLONY IN JUTLAND 55 of central Jutland. Frederik’s Parish was actually established for the purpose of colonisation. Prior to the establishment of the parish, the sandy moorland was a source of heather for firewood that was system- atically cut and gathered by the peasants in the surrounding parishes. This changed with the establishment of the new parish. The Danes in the neighbourhood were deprived of their rights and resented the Ger- man colonists who consequently found themselves rather isolated. Almost half the Germans were Presbyterians (Andersen 1980: 118), and they spoke a language that most of the neighbouring peasants did not understand; the Germans themselves did not speak Danish. However, the rest of the immigrants were Lutherans, who did at least share a faith, if not a language, with the Danes. In the parish church the German language was used for services until 1856. Thereafter, German and Danish services alternated, and from 1870 the sole church language was Danish. This indicates that, after about a hundred years, the descendants of the German migrants felt themselves to some extent integrated. However, the origins of these assimilated people remained clearly evident in their names. Some married Danes but as late as 1880 there was still much intermarriage among the descendants of the Ger- mans, and some of their surnames (e.g. Bitsch, Dürr and Maul) still survive in Denmark today (cf. Danskernes Navne 2006). 3. Aims and methods The survival of a surname over a century or two primarily depends on the number of sons born in each generation, whereas the survival of a Christian name is primarily a matter of culture. By tabulating the Christian names in Frederik’s Parish through censuses from 1801 and 1880, I shall investigate two questions. First: Was there a shift from German to Danish Christian names over the course of the nineteenth century, matching the shift from German to Danish language in the church services? Second, a more speculative question: what were the cultural politics involved in the choice of Christian names by long- established families of immigrant background? Were Christian names chosen as tributes to forbears, as marks of nominal resistance to con- temporaries, or as marks of integration into Danish culture? To establish a suitable corpus of names for this investigation I have used digitalized censuses made by the Dansk Dataarkiv (Danish Data Archive) in Dansk Demografisk Database (Danish Demographic 996190_ONOMA_46_02.indd6190_ONOMA_46_02.indd 5555 224/04/134/04/13 114:364:36 56 BIRGIT EGGERT Database, www.ddd.dda.dk). I have chosen to investigate the Christian names in the censuses from 1801 and 1880. The 1801 census because it makes it possible to compare the material with the nationwide usage of names in Denmark which I uncovered in an earlier investigation, and the 1880 census because it is the latest census available in digitalized format. The 1880 census would also reveal the name usage in the ten years after Danish had become the only language in the church in Frederik’s Parish. The search tools in the digitalized censuses are designed to iden- tify individuals; they are not satisfactory for identifying groups. It is necessary to know a part of each individual’s name to do a search, and that is why I have made searches for people with the known surnames of the German families that were living in Frederik’s Parish after 1763. Children were given their father’s surname, which makes it the most obvious way to search for the Christian names. Naturally, in the course of the last two centuries, descendants of the Germans have moved out of the parish, while Danes have moved in. The focus of the present survey, however, is the descendants of the German immigrants living in Frederik’s Parish. 4. The corpus The surnames of the German families in Frederik’s Parish have been identified by Valdemar Andersen (1980: 232-243). These surnames have been used to establish the corpus of Christian names in the par- ish, and they are listed in table 1 with the number of persons found in the censuses of 1801 and 1880. 1801 census 1880 census Number (spelling in 1801) Number (spelling in 1880) Agricola 2 – Bärthel 17 (Bärdel/Bardel) 26 (Bertel/Berthel/Bertil) Betzer 8 (Besser) 11 (Besser) Bitsch 24 67 Brauner 32 47 (Breuner) Cramer 13 21 (Cramer/Kramer) Dickes 1 (Dickses) – Dörr 15 (Dirr) 16 (Dürr) Frank 11 – 996190_ONOMA_46_02.indd6190_ONOMA_46_02.indd 5656 224/04/134/04/13 114:364:36 A GERMAN COLONY IN JUTLAND 57 Harritz 12 22 (Harritz/Harrtiz/Harrritz) Herbel-Schmidt – – Hermann 13 (Hörmann) 19 (Herman/Hermand) Herold 8 (Höroldt) 10 (Herholt) Jung 11 19 Krath 15 (Kradt) 17 (Krath/Kradt) Kriegbaum 11 18 (Kriegbaum/Krigbaum) Laier 7 (Layer) 19 (Lajer/Laier) Lauth 9 21 Märcher 8 (Marker) – Marquard 4 (Marqvardt) – Maul 6 14 Morast 7 15 (Moratz) Philbert 24 (Vielbert/Veilbert) 10 (Philbert/Filbert) Risch 7 1 Rost 8 3 Schönheiter 2 (Schönheitr/Schönheiter) – Wackerhausen 7 (Wacker) – Winkler 15 24 (Vinkler) Würtz 12 52 total 309 452 Table 1: The surnames used to establish the corpus for the investigation and the number of persons in the corpus with each surname in each of the two censuses. The headforms are taken from Andersen 1980: 233 ff.; variant spellings are given in brackets. The Christian names used by the Germans in Frederik’s Parish were not unfamiliar to the Danes. Many common Christian names used in Denmark since the late Middle Ages have been German, or Danish variants of German names. Thus, the specific names from Frederik’s Parish do not differ from the general name usage in Denmark. The salient point is the absence of names of Danish or Nordic origin and Danish developments of names from the saints’ calendar and the Bible. In the corpus different spellings have been added together in some cases. Feminine names whose only difference is the final vowel -a or -e, have been added together, e.g. Anna/Anne and Maria/Marie. 996190_ONOMA_46_02.indd6190_ONOMA_46_02.indd 5757 224/04/134/04/13 114:364:36 58 BIRGIT EGGERT Similarly with name-forms such as Christina/Cristina, Margaretha/ Magaretha, Filip/Philip/Phillip/Philipp, Christoffer/Christopher/Kris- toffer etc. I have also interpreted a few odd spellings as misspellings in the digitalization process caused by hitting the wrong key, e.g. Ekisabeth for Elisabeth, Cathatina for Catharina, Jacon for Jacob, or hitting one key too many, e.g.