What was Mormonism's appeal to Scandinavian-Americans?

[The world will shine with light in our nightmare]

A year or two ago, realisticidealist invented this neat tool that tracks people's surnames and first names and shows in which US counties those names are over- or underrepresented relative to the national average. One constant trend I discovered is that Scandinavian surnames (Jacobsen, Erikson, Jacksen, etc.) were concentrated not only in and around Minneapolis, as expected, but also in Utah as well as heavily-LDS eastern Idaho.

What might specifically explain early Mormonism's appeal to Scandinavians, and presumably drove these populations to this region among the rest of Young's adherents?

[Matty]

I was under the impression that the vast majority of mormons were of english blood?

Most mormons to this day had ancestors in upstate new york where mormonism initially spread like a fire

upstate new york at the time was heavily english

[PSOL]

Mormons sent missionaries there to convert them in the late 1800s. Due to the holiness of Utah, this led to immigration there.

[ingemann]

A year or two ago, realisticidealist invented this neat tool that tracks people's surnames and first names and shows in which US counties those names are over- or underrepresented relative to the national average. One constant trend I discovered is that Scandinavian surnames (Jacobsen, Erikson, Jacksen, etc.) were concentrated not only in and around Minneapolis, as expected, but also in Utah as well as heavily-LDS western Idaho.

What might specifically explain early Mormonism's appeal to Scandinavians, and presumably drove these populations to this region among the rest of Young's adherents?

It doesn’t, most Scandinavian American Mormons are of Danish descendent and converted in the 19th century in Denmark after freedom of religion was established, which accidental fell together with Mormons sending a lot of missionaries to Europe. The converts mostly emigrated to Mormon areas in USA. So the overrepresentation of Danish ancestry among Mormons is a artifact of this large early conversion, while the membership was relative small and other Scandinavians and later Danes didn’t have the same interest in Mormonism.


Danish ancestry USA

[RI]

The LDS Church sent missionaries to many European countries in the 1840s and 1850s, but they found more success in Denmark than in most European countries mostly due to good timing. LDS missionaries first arrived in Denmark in 1850. Just two years earlier, the Revolutions of 1848 had swept through central Europe and had an especially large impact in Demark. King Christian VIII died in 1848, leading to the implementation of a constitutional monarchy in 1849. Part of this change was the enshrinement of religious freedom into law for the first time in Danish history, a consequence of a growing Baptist and restorationist movement in Denmark which had been previously repressed by the Lutheran church. The missionaries therefore found fertile ground the following year for conversions and these conversions often led to emigration to the United States.