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Keywords

immigration, agriculture, heritage

Abstract

My father’s family comes from a small Danish farming community in Als parish in Jutland, where it was customary for young people to marry the sons and daughters of neighboring farmers. It was a closed community, largely because of a policy known as adscription (restricting peasants to the estate of their birth) that did not allow able-bodied men to leave the parish. This policy was in place for most of the eighteenth century, but in 1788, adscription was abolished. In the same period, the population in Denmark was increasing rapidly, due to, among other things, better hygiene and lower child mortality. The agricultural industry could not absorb the excess workers, which resulted in a country with too little land and too many hands. Since America was at the same time a country with too few hands and lots of land to be plowed and cultivated, it presented a great opportunity for these people to uproot their families, cross the Atlantic, and start a new life in the land of opportunity. Many people from my father’s poor rural parish seized these opportunities and moved to the Midwest, where they settled in the southwest corner of Iowa, among other places.

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