Terps, borgs and the pink granite coast: Another place, another time

We have been very busy hunting down the villages my ancestors came from in the peninsula of Jutland.

We first found Jelling and from there quickly came to Bredston village, the home of my great great great grandmother, Ane Mette Hansdatter. The church Ane would have attended with her family was delightfully white, with an onion-shaped spire atop. Ane, such a pretty name, had a daughter with another pretty name, Maren.

Forstballe, where my great great grandmother Maren Neilsdatter came from, is so tiny it has no church at all. There are only one or two farmhouses that make up the entire Forstballe hamlet, and Maren's nearest church, mentioned in her baptismal records, is just a couple of kilometres along a rural road, at Norup.

The land we pass is farmland: there are soft green rolling hills, an occasional pretty wood and sometimes the trees merge to make a welcoming tunnel across the roads. Everywhere in Denmark there are birds chattering and singing: they are pleased to see us. It feels quite English in parts, and so familiar. Not in any way alien.

It just feels right, as if the very blood that zings in your body that comes from these people recognises these parts and is happy that you are here.

We then found the Gauerslund parish church where my great grandfather, Peder Mathiason no doubt attended church, and where he was baptised. We had been looking for his home village on Google Maps and on the Sat Nav, but could not find it. But the very last grave we visited in the church at Gauerslund showed that the name I had been hunting down might have been wrong. Instead of Tellerup, it should be Sellerup. I had been confusing the European S for a T in transcription. Such a common error in genealogy.

So, we followed this new lead and found Sellerup just 2 kilometres away from its Gauerslund parish church. Here, Peder and Maren had their first child, my grandfather Niels Pedersen. Here he grew up with his brothers, Andreas and Mathias, and his sister, Mette.

Sellerup is a tiny farming hamlet still, no more than half a dozen houses still standing. It has two or three older farms from the 19th century and even earlier that exist still. These Peder and Neils and the family certainly would have been familiar with. It is highly likely they might even have worked on one or other of these very farms.

While we were moseying around the little hamlet we were noticed. Two local farmers came over and chatted to us: one drove his tractor. They were the owners of the two oldest properties. I told them about my relatives. They told us that all the land that my relatives once worked had belonged to the king of Denmark who had his castle just south of here, in Kolding. The king had a hunting lodge just a few kilometres from Sellerup which had a footpath leading to it that was four horses wide: a luxury, probably built by his peasant workers.

Around the time of the French Revolution, after the peasants revolt, the agricultural land in Denmark was broken up and given to the peasants, who became tenant farmers. So in these rolling hills busy with canola crops, dairy farming and pig husbandry my Danish ancestors lived, worked, prayed and played. Over a period of three or four generations they, like most folk at the time, lived geographically very close. They didn't stray too far from home. A ride of just over 20 kilometres connects all my family birthplaces.

Then my great grandfather Niels took to the sea. He found his way to the sunny climes of Australia, where he married a wee Irish lass and started a brand new brood of his own. In another place. In another time.