Ringkøbing, Denmark

A harbor town behind the dunes

Ringkøbing grew up in the Middle Ages on the eastern shore of a wide, shallow fjord. Its name first appears around 1325 as Rennumkøpingh, joining the name of the old parish of Rindum with købing, a trading place. On January 27, 1443, King Christopher of Bavaria confirmed the town's market privileges, which were already older than that. Sheltered from the North Sea by a long barrier of dunes, it was one of the very few harbor towns on Denmark's west coast, and in the 1500s it did a good trade, especially in cattle.

The good years did not last. In the 1600s wars hurt the town, and the fjord's outlet to the sea kept drifting south and silting up, so ships had a harder and harder time reaching Ringkøbing. It stayed a small, quiet place for a long while. Better times returned in the 1830s, the West Jutland railway between Esbjerg and Struer reached the town in 1875, and a proper harbor was built in 1904-1905. Today it is the largest town in Ringkøbing-Skjern Municipality, and its old streets still run down toward the fjord.

The old county

In 1793 Ringkøbing became the seat of a county governor, and Ringkøbing County (Ringkøbing Amt, also spelled Ringkjøbing) became the frame for much of western Jutland's official life. The county reached from the Limfjord in the north, including Lemvig and the coastal parishes around Ferring, down past Ringkøbing Fjord. It was a land of heath, moor, dunes and scattered farms, and to the end it had the lowest population density of any Danish county.

For family historians this matters because parish registers, census lists and many other records were organized by county and by herred (district) within it. The county was reshaped in the 1970 reform and abolished on January 1, 2007, when its area became part of the Central Denmark Region.

The fjord, Holmsland Klit and Hvide Sande

Ringkøbing Fjord covers about 300 square kilometers, but half of it is less than 2 meters deep. On its west side lies Holmsland Klit, a sand barrier roughly 40 kilometers long and only 1 to 2 kilometers wide, with big dunes, heath and old farmhouses of red brick. In the 1700s the fjord was salty enough for oyster banks, and a large herring fishery worked near the outlet at Nymindegab.

As the outlet silted up, water levels and saltiness swung wildly. Meadows around the fjord flooded and spoiled, and sailing to Ringkøbing became difficult. A first canal was dug through the dunes at Hvide Sande ("white sands") around 1910, but within months it had become a wide tidal channel that let storm surges into the fjord, and it was closed again after about five years. The lasting fix came with a sluice built from 1929, whose gates first opened on August 30, 1931. The fishing town of Hvide Sande grew up around the locks, and its harbor is today counted among the five largest fishing harbors in Denmark.

Leaving for America

It surprises many descendants to learn that Ringkøbing County sent fewer emigrants, relative to its size, than almost any other part of Denmark. Records studied by Henning Bender, former head of the Danish Emigration Archives, show 4,664 emigrants from the county between 1868 and 1910, about 5 percent of its 1890 population, against roughly 10 percent for Denmark as a whole and 16 percent for Hjørring County in the far north. The historian Kristian Hvidt likewise found that most emigrants did not come from the poorest parts of western and central Jutland.

One likely reason is that western Jutland still had land to win at home. From 1866 the Danish Heath Society worked to turn heath into farmland and plantations, with marl, drainage, irrigation and shelter belts. Even so, many did leave. A farmhand, a younger son with no farm to inherit, or a fisherman's child could see little ahead but hard work for others. In America, the Homestead Act of 1862 promised 160 acres to a settler who stayed five years, steamships had cut the crossing to ten days or two weeks, and letters and prepaid tickets from relatives already there made the step easier. When members of the Gransgaard, Nielsen and Pedersen families made their way to Boyd County, Nebraska, around 1890-1910, they were part of a smaller but steady stream from this coast.