A family mystery...

As I think I’ve mentioned, my great-grandfather was from Denmark.  For reasons I’m not entirely clear on, I’ve always felt slightly proud of this and have had a small inclination - when it suited me - to consider Denmark the “old country” and to passionately love The Killing. My ancestors were Vikings, which means they probably look down (or up) from Valhalla with a slight sense of disappointment at how the family line has turned out but having Viking ancestors is nothing to be sneezed at.  And if you do sneeze at it, I may well come round your house and pillage it, just for old time’s sake.

His name was Rasmussen - other famous Rasmussens were Prime Ministers of Denmark (at least two different ones), several football players and assorted poets, writers, film directors, singers, artists and architects.  I could be related to any one of them - or possibly even all of them; after all, Denmark is only a small place with only 5.5m people and less than 2% of them are called Rasmussen.  That’s only 110,000 people, roughly - surely the odds are good? 

The story was that he left Denmark in search of work in the early 20th century and moved to Wales, to work in the mines.  Given my current plans, I’ve felt a great deal of affinity with great-grandpappy Rasmussen, even if he did change the family name to Smith.  I was, I happily told myself, following in my ancestor’s footsteps - striking out for pastures new, to make a new life in a new country.  There was something very satisfying about it, a sense of completion.  The family lived in the UK for about a hundred years and then moved on to a different part of the world.

I say “the story’’because I can’t remember who told me this and, memory being plastic, there is a faint chance that I may just have made it up.  So I decided to check with my dad, just for confirmation and to see what else was known about his grandfather.  I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t asked.  The email I got back said that, as far as dad knows, great-grandpappy Rasmussen was in the Merchant Navy; his ship was sunk, probably in the Channel, and he settled in Wales.  

This is, I’m sure you’ll agree, extremely unsatisfactory.

This will not do. It can’t be that he just ended up here by accident, surely? That doesn’t fit with my idea of the past at all! It also raises more questions than it answers: why did he stay? How was he able to settle here?  What about his family in Denmark, presuming he had one? If he had been separated from them by accident, why not go back? 

I’d like to find out more but where do I begin? Anyone done this sort of thing before?