As you probably know by now, my name is Bjarne Anker Kofoed. (according to patronymic I should have been Poul Knudsen Kofoed). "Bjarne" is an old Nordic/Scandinavian name and means "bear". It's equivalent to the name "Bjørn/Bjorn". "Anker" means Anchor and was my father's mother's surname. Both my parents are Ko(e)fo(e)ds, though my father is a Kofoed (he belongs to both the Kofoed, the Jochumsen and the Schou families), and my mother is a Kofod (she belongs to the Kofoed and Dahl families). I descend from most of the people mentioned above.

I was born in Bornholm in 1961. I moved from Bornholm to the 2nd largest city in Denmark, Aarhus, in 1984, when I started to work in Denmark's largest, private owned, Computer Services Company called LEC (now IBM). In 1991 I started to study Architecture and Industrial Design at the Aarhus School of Architects, and graduated as an Industrial Designer in 1996. You might wonder why I suddenly wanted to study, but actually it was an old dream, and the reason for starting so late, has something to do with the way we are admitted into the Danish education-system.

I really don't remember when I started to get interested in Genealogy, but I don't think I was very old. My parents have books of each their families, and it didn't take me long to realize, that the 2 books had the same starting-point (Jochum Tønnesen Müller), and that all the families were so tightly woven together by several marriages, that it would be far the best thing to rewrite the 2 books into one. Which I' finished in 1996.

Why did I take up Genealogy (again)?

Well, I got an email from a cousin of mine, who had received an email from a couple of Australians. My cousin didn't really know what to do about the email, but somehow she remembered that I had been messing around with our family-books, and forwarded the email to me. The Australians (2 brothers) had been searching on the Internet for people with the same surname as themselves (Kofod), and didn't find me, because I'm a Kofoed, but some of my cousins on my mother's side.

I think the Australians were quite shocked to realize that Kofod wasn't such a special surname (I think they found 15 email addresses of Kofods), but still they wrote a nice note to everyone, and told a bit about themselves and who they descended from.

I didn't know or remember any of the names they had listed in their email, and wrote back and told them that it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack to find their living Danish relatives. I think all this happened around November 1996.

At X-mas I went to visit my parents, and took a print of the email with me, in case I should discover something interesting. I didn't discover something interesting, I discovered the impossible. Their great-great-grandparents and their great-grandfather and all his siblings were in my father's book. I couldn't believe my eyes.

When I got back home, I wrote back and told what had happened, and started to search for some descent Genealogy-software on the Internet, found it, and started to put people into it. When I had put most of my own information, all the lines back to the first mentioned ancestors and the information about the Australians' ancestors, into my file, I printed out the tree and snailmailed it to Australia. Since then my time spent on Genealogy has increased in a way I never would have believed when I started out.

Just keep on writing, please.

What should we do without Internet and World Wide Web?