Danish, anyone?

Palle Jensen wants to know.

Jensen, a producer for a television station in Denmark, recently traveled to Warren County to track down nearly 1,000 former residents of Bornholm, a small island in the Baltic Sea.

Jensen spent Monday and Tuesday at the Warren County Historical Society, poring through records for evidence of a mass Danish migration to the Warren and Jamestown region in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century. His research is paving the way for a return trip to the area in July.

According to Jensen, 16 percent of Bornholm's inhabitants emigrated to the United States between 1868 and 1904. Sixty-five percent of those Danish immigrants settled in Warren and Chautauqua counties. Jensen wants to tell the stories of those Danes who made their way to America in a documentary he plans to shoot this summer.

As part of the documentary, he will reunite a man living in Bornholm today with relatives of his ancestors who moved to America at the turn of the last century, now living in Illinois.

Jensen's trip in July will begin at Ellis Island in New York City and move west through Warren County before ending with the reunion in America's heartland.

One question Jensen pondered on during the time he spent at the Warren County Historical Society was why so many of his countrymen chose to settle in northwestern Pennsylvania and southern New York.

"It's a question I cannot answer," he said. "It was probably through letters that went back home: 'It's a nice place. Come here.'"

He theorized that the climate and some of the local landscape may have reminded the Danish settlers of their island home.

"(Bornholm) is a beautiful place," Jensen said. "It's the only place in Denmark where there are rocks. Your area may have reminded them of that, although the hills aren't as high."

Jensen said he first became interested in documenting Danish settlements in America 25 years ago when he traveled to the United States doing programs for Danish radio.

"I thought it was a fantastic story," Jensen said. "Ever since, I had a dream to tell those stories using sound and pictures. It's a fantastic story. All kinds of history is very, very important. If you don't know where you came from, you don't know where to go."

During his trip to the area, Jensen traveled to Jamestown, where he toured the Lakeview Cemetery. There, he discovered a grave of a former resident of Bornholm who died in Jamestown.

"Walking around and looking at (these immigrants' graves), you realize these were people who built this country. They had the same hopes and dreams that we do. It was a strange feeling. We are so, so very small in this world."

Jensen encouraged anyone in the area who may be of Danish ancestry with relatives from the island of Bornholm to contact him via email at Larisa105@hotmail.com "Hopefully before July," he said.

Jensen noted that Warren County is known for having a large Swedish population. A quick litmus test to figure out which side of the Baltic Sea your ancestors came from: if your last name is Peterson, Larson or Anderson, you're Swedish. If the "son" in your last name is spelled "sen," you're most likely of the Danish persuasion maybe even with roots back to Bornholm and might want to drop Jensen a line before July.