Danmarjk?
- I've got Watches put on many of my Danish ancestors in FS. Someone, who I assume might be Danish, just went in and changed a lot of the localities from Denmark or Danmark to Danmarjk. This spelling is new to me. Is it legitimate?
Answers
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Wikipedia indicates "Danmark may refer to the Danish, Norwegian and Swedish name for the country of Denmark." I have seen this previously but never have I seen Danmarjk.
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Have you messaged this other user for an explanation? My wife, who is Norwegian, has never seen this. Googling the spelling does bring up a few matches but without any explanation. Most intriguing is this newspaper article:
Only one of the three instances of Danmark is spelled Danmarjk which is strange and suggests a typo, but the article is written in Faroese which is the language spoken in Faroe Islands. By any chance were your Danish ancestors actually born there? I couldn't find anything else that suggests that is the Faroese spelling for Denmark.
If you do find an explanation, please let us know.
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@Gordon Collett None of my ancestors were born or lived on the Faroe Islands. What I'm beginning to wonder is if the person who made the changes is from there. If so, should I just leave it? will it make any difference?
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So, I just messaged her. I clicked on the relationship link in the message and she's a 12th cousin on a non-Danish line and her ancestors were from Oklahoma! This gets weirder and weirder.
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Did you ask her directly why she made the change to the spelling of Denmark?
Could you post the ID of one of the people she made the change to? The context might give some clues as to what she was doing.
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I did ask her that question very directly. She hasn't responded yet. Her username sounds very American. That's why I decided to check if we were related, instead of assuming she was from Faroe.
ID for person with changes: 2W98-S6V
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The username I'm seeing by the changes is "kristensen," and clicking on that brings up her full name. Her first name is Birthe, which is extremely Danish, so I do wonder why she changed the locations to "Danmarjk"--the Danish spelling is "Danmark," so perhaps a typing error just snuck in. The changes were made in October 2018.
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Oh! You're right. I confused it with the most recent person that made a change whose name is apparently Maisie. I messaged the wrong person too! My bad.
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Makes sense! If the other person doesn't reply, I suggest just going ahead and changing it to "Denmark" (or "Danmark").
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I took a look, too, and couldn't see any justification for the change. I did see that the same contributor put a note on the record that is in Danish.
Going to the Danish National Archives and searching for "Danmarjk" gave this:
So if there is nothing on the Danish archive site and basically nothing on the internet that uses that term, I also would be very comfortable changing them back to Danmark (since you do have Danish relatives working on these Danish lines, I feel it would be polite to stick with fully Danish place names rather than mixed Danish/English.)
You should leave a comment in the reason statement. Something like, "Another user entered Danmarjk for the country but there does not seem to be any supporting evidence that that was ever an accepted spelling for the country name. If it was, please document this fact."
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These are great suggestions - thanks to both of you!
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Birthe responded to my message and said it was a misspelling on her part.
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