The so called Death Roll consists of records separated from the register of censuses that were performed on a half-yearly basis by the Copenhagen Police in the period 1893 to 1923. When a person died his or her census data was removed from the register and put in a special roll as the data from a police point of view became obsolete. The roll comprises 59.988 men and 43.858 women. In addition to this you will also find information on 43.462 spouses.

The people who in 1923 were alive remained in the police register. When the national registers were introduced in 1924 (law of March 14, 1924), the police register became the basis of the Copenhagen part of the new registers.

The police register was supposed to include all male persons over 10 years and single women. A married woman was registered below the husband’s name. There are however a lot of exceptions to that rule.

The transcription of the Death Roll was completed in 1978 after nearly 3 years of work. This database is a transcription of the 1978 transcription . Obviously this is not an optimal choice, especially in light of the fact that the police initially also transcribed the information they got from censuses. It means that the data has been transcribed 3 times, with all the possibilities for transcription mistakes. A new transcription of the original documents was not considered as it would prolong the work with several years.

Let me say straight out: "There - are- many errors in the register" . It is my assessment that at least 15 to 20% of the data is flawed (!). Having said that, I have to stress that most of these errors are trivial. Names are not spelled as in the parish registers, some of the first names are missing, place names are not the official versions, etc., etc.

In a number of cases (<5%) date of birth was not stated in the register, but age. On the basis of the declared age, I have calculated the year of birth and have registered it as a 01-01-yyyy. It is a rather uncertain date, since in several cases it was not specified –when- the age was noted! It will be stated under remarks if a birth date is calculated.

The letter “aa” is used throughout the database and not the letter “å”. I have made it possible to make a search with “å”, but the return value will always be “aa”.