The 1880-Census as a Source for the Usage of Middle Names in the 19th Century Denmark

Lars-Jakob Harding Kællerød (Department of Nordic Research, UCPH) will talk about his PhD project in progress entitled: ”The Danish Middle Name: A Study of the Establishment of the Surname-Typological Middle Name in the 19th Century”.

By making a basic categorization of the surname-typological middle names in usage and compare these to different demographic and geographic aspects, Lars-Jakob aims to give a thorough overview of the usage of middle names in Denmark in the 19th century and to give suggestions for the motives behind the usage of these names.

The corpus of names for the project is deducted from the entire population’s names in the 1880-census. Lars-Jakob will present some preliminary results from the project and discusses pros and cons of using the census as source in the study.