Klemensker Parish - Probate Records - 1686-1814

In 1968 the Family History Library published a book, Register of Danish Estate Probates: Bornholm County. It was part of a series where volunteers extracted family information from probate records for each county in Denmark for the parishes where early church records (prior to about 1770-1814) were non-existent. In the future I will add a list of those parishes that were included in this study and references to all of the published volumes.

The volunteers who did this were mostly older, retired Scandinavian immigrants who were living in the Salt Lake City area. They often did not have much experience reading the old handwriting or doing Danish research, but could read the Danish language. Because of this these books are full of mistakes or omissions. For example in going over the extracts from Klemensker parish I found many small errors such as Adzer Andersen for Anders Andersen, Per for Peder, Jorgen Andersen of Klemensker parish was actually from Nyker Parish but his widow and her new husband (who wasn't mentioned in the extract) was from Klemensker Parish, etc. In spite of all these small mistakes and omissions, these indexes are an invaluable tool. What I suggest for the errors is that if you are interested in a particular family or farm, that you go back to the original and study it.

In my mind, the greatest problem with these extracts was actually an omission of the place of residence designations. The addresses of people were mentioned in the probate records which is an invaluable source of information in sorting out common patronymic names and for clues of earlier generations. It is unfortunate that this information was not included in the extractions. Because of the importance this plays, I have gone back to the original sources and added the place of residence designation for each of the probates. Unfortunately I do not have time right now to note the residence designation for all of the heirs (ie. the children or grandchildren to the deceased person). Perhaps this can be added in the future. If you find a probate that is of interest to you, then it would be in your interest to pay attention to those distinctions when you go back to the original probate.

Also there are probably several clues with regards to the Guardians that were not extracted. Sometimes these may be men engaged to the widow, parents or uncles, etc. Their address and relationships may be missing from this extract and might be worth looking for in the original.

It should also be noted that the people who did this extraction work converted all of the female -datter suffixes to -sen to make it more uniform. We have now gone back to the practice of leaving the surnames how they appear in the original document. I have therefore converted the female -sen back to -dr (abbreviation for -datter) and in doing so hopefully have not added in additional errors. As you find errors, feel free to submit corrections so this can become a better resource as time goes on. They also did not have access to the special keys Æ, Ø, Å, so generally left those off. If I know what they should be I have often added the correct character back, but again hopefully haven't also added in more mistakes in doing so.

In spite of all of these inadequacies, this represents a wonderful finding tool and resource to people researching in towns where the early church records have been destroyed. I hope eventually this information for Klemensker Parish can be combined with other sources and the Kure register to provide a wonderful aid to people researching the families of this parish.

The following volumes were included in this extraction (I will add links in this chart to the actual extracted information):

[NOTE: This is going to have to come in installments and be an ongoing project as it will take me a little while to transfer this information to the computer]