You can download a limited amount of data from the page. Read how here.
This page only concerns downloading data from the search page—that is, search results. If you are interested in downloading the full datasets, you should instead access them via the Danish National Archives’ Digidata page (follow this link to access Link-Lives Release 2 from 2025).
You must create a user account and log in to access the download button. Once logged in, you will see the “download” button on the right-hand side of the search results page. From here, you can download your search results. Find a guide to the search function here.
How to do it:
Please note that large search results may take a long time to download.
Also read about Rights and use of data on Link-Lives.
We have observed that the download function occasionally does not work as intended. If you experience this, try the following solution:
Once you have successfully used the button, you can experiment with new searches, for example using only life courses.
You can download both search results, as well as a single person record and a single life course.
Regardless of what you download, you will receive a file with many columns:
When you download a life course, you will receive one row per person record in the life course.
If you download life courses in Excel, you will also receive information about the links in a separate tab. This is not included if you download in .csv format.
If you download a single person record in Excel, you will receive related persons (for example, members of the household) in a separate tab. These are not included if you download in .csv format.
The Link-Lives team has prepared complete codebooks for the individual datasets describing exactly what each column contains. These can be found in the Link-Lives Release 2 Guide (section 12). Download the Link-Lives Release 2 Guide under “Documentation” here.
The purpose of the function is to allow researchers, students, upper secondary school teachers, and pupils to create small extracts for research and teaching purposes. For example, a search result consisting of everyone in Denmark in the 1880 census who were born in Agger parish. Or everyone who lived in Agger parish in 1880. Or life courses and person records for all bakers in Hillerød across the entire dataset.
Genealogists can also benefit from the function—for example, you can download life courses and person records for everyone in the dataset with the surname Kallehauge. However, because the download function is aimed at research and teaching, the tables you download are large and complex. You should therefore expect to clean up the results yourself afterwards.
If you are interested in using the full datasets or more advanced extracts, you can read about data access (extracts) in the Link-Lives Release 2 Guide (section 2.2). Download the Link-Lives Release 2 Guide under “Documentation” here.
