Danes asked to map 23,500 historic postcards

The Royal Danish Library and the National Museum have published 23,500 digitised postcards and are asking the public to help identify the precise places shown, DR reports.

Many of the postcards are registered only with a town name. The institutions are seeking help identifying the streets, buildings and other locations depicted on them through the National Museum’s platform, hvorerdetfra.dk.

“We simply need Danes to look at these postcards and help us place them on the map of Denmark,” said Bente Skovgaard Kristensen, director of the Royal Danish Library. She added that members of the public sometimes have more precise local knowledge than researchers.

The postcards offer a record of Denmark’s past, documenting everything from villages and market towns to courtyards and cities that have changed significantly over time. The collection includes examples from Agersted in Jutland, Højerup and Hellested on Zealand, as well as postcards whose exact locations have not yet been identified.

Skovgaard Kristensen said she hoped the project would engage people across the country and encourage conversations about where Danes come from and what has shaped them.

“It is really important that we as a people know what has happened to our country over the past 100 years, where we are today and where we are heading,” she said.

The project follows the end of traditional letter delivery by PostNord at the turn of the year, which also marked the removal of Denmark’s familiar red postboxes. In earlier times, postcards played an important role in communication, according to Skovgaard Kristensen.

“That was how we communicated with one another, and there was also an image that said something,” she said. Before the telephone became widespread, postcards were an easy way to communicate and generally arrived relatively quickly.

The Royal Danish Library’s collection of about 312,500 postcards is being digitised through 2027. The postcards date from 1888 to around 2000. So far, the 23,500 postcards that are free of copyright have been made available for identification.

The platform is run by the National Museum and currently includes material from the Royal Danish Library, the National Museum, Museum Lolland-Falster and Den Gamle By.

Cultural Minister Zenia Stampe also urged people to help identify the locations, saying local residents may recognise places that an employee unfamiliar with a town’s geography would not.