At Home Without a Home: Children in Transitional Homes in Denmark, 1885–1920

Lead project by Mikkel Thelle, Amalie Olga Lyngsted and Bárbara Ana Revuelta-Eugercios.

At Home Without a Home (ChildHomes) follows the lives of children who grew up in poverty, without stable homes, or in institutional care in Denmark between 1885 and 1920. The project is led by TRANSITION Lead Investigator Mikkel Thelle from the National Museum of Denmark and carried out in close collaboration with research assistant Amalie Olga Lyngsted and project senior research scientist Bárbara Ana Revuelta-Eugercios at the Danish National Archives.

By linking scattered archival traces, the project brings together fragments of lives that have largely remained out of sight. It places the child – rather than the institution – at the center.

The project is set in a time of major change. Around 1900, Denmark was becoming more urban and industrialized. Families were reshaped, welfare systems expanded, and many children moved between countryside and towns, between households and institutions. These movements were recorded, but what happened to the children later in life is often unclear. As Amalie explains:

“Historians have long asked how we can access children’s experiences in the archives – especially those who grew up on the margins of society. We usually only see them when they enter institutions, and after that, they largely disappear from view. By combining quantitative and qualitative methods, and bringing together machine learning with domain expertise, this project opens up new ways of tracing their lives and understanding what it meant to grow up in poverty and vulnerability in late nineteenth-century Denmark.”

ChildHomes asks what became of these children. Did early instability shape their education, work, and family life? How did gender and place matter? By reconstructing life trajectories and comparing them to those of other children, the project opens new ways of understanding inequality in a changing society.

The project draws on three main types of material: linked life-course data from the Link-Lives project, now hosted at the Historical Person Register (HisPeR), memoirs from the National Museum, and case files from care institutions. By bringing these sources together, it becomes possible to follow lives across time, even when the records are scattered. As Mikkel puts it:

What excites me about this project is that it works on several levels at once: it helps prepare a large body of overlooked data for future research on children at the margins of society; it allows us to push methods in cultural history by working across quantitative and qualitative approaches; and it strengthens collaboration between TRANSITION, the National Archives, and the National Museum.

Funded by the Carlsberg Foundation through a Digital Research Infrastructure Grant, the project will create a new open-access database on childhood vulnerability in early twentieth-century Denmark. ChildHomes is a collaboration between the National Museum of Denmark, the Danish National Archives, and TRANSITION.