♂Anders Hansen

Anders Hansen (3 August 1794 – 19 March 1861) was a farmer at Vesterhøjst, in the parish of Højst in the Duchy of Schleswig, born the son of a landless day-laborer who lived on poor relief, who rose to hold a full farm of his own. He was the third great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his daughter Anna Magdaline Hansen (born 1819).

Early life

Anders was born on 3 August 1794 at Rørkær, a village in Hostrup parish near Tønder, and baptized in Hostrup church a week later. The German-language register enters him as Anders Wollesen, the son of Hans Wollesen, an Inste (a cottager without land), and his wife Karen, born Andersen. His parents had married in Hostrup church on 26 April 1794, a little over three months before his birth. His father, then a farm servant at Rørkær, born there in 1773, was the son of the late cottager Wolle Wollesen and Kirsten Hansen of the same village, a family that also used the by-name Frösig and descended from a man of Varde in Jutland; his mother was the daughter of Anders, a smallholder who had died by then, and Johanna Peters of Hünnerup. Hans’s surname is a local form of Olesen, and the register writes the child under his father’s surname; in later life Anders went by the patronymic Hansen, “son of Hans”, and the registers of Højst usually call him Andreas.

The census of 1803, as transcribed, finds the family still at Rørkær: Hans Wollesen, aged 33, a lodger and day-laborer who received alms from the parish, his wife Caren Andersen, also 33, and two sons, Andreas, aged 9, and Hans, aged 6. For a boy from such a household to become a Hufner, the owner of a full farm, was a considerable rise; the records do not say how the farm came to him.

Marriage and family

Anders had married Mariana Jacobsen, the daughter of Peter Jacobsen and his wife Ingeborg, at Højst on 29 February 1816, and by 1817 the couple had settled at Vesterhøjst, where the baptisms of their children describe him as a Hufner. The couple had seven children, all born at Vesterhøjst between 1817 and 1834. Mariana died on 29 November 1839, and her burial entry records that her husband and all seven children were then living. In December 1842 their daughter Anna Magdaline married Peter Nicolai Thomsen in Højst church.

The census of 1845, as transcribed, lists Anders as a widower and farmer at Vesterhøjst with five of the children still at home. He later married a second time, to Mariane Kristiansen of Øster Højst; the marriage was childless. In the census of 1860, as transcribed, he appears at Øster Højst aged 66, described as a retired farmer living on his Aftægt, the maintenance agreement by which a farmer handed over his land in return for board and lodging, and as separated from his wife.

Death

Anders Hansen died at Alslev, in Højst parish, on 19 March 1861, and was buried at Højst on 26 March. His burial entry names his parents as Hans Olesen and Karen Andersen of Jesing, in Hostrup parish, records both marriages, and lists all seven children of the first, all of them living: Peter Jacobsen at Tønder, Anna Magdalene, the wife of Peter Nikolaj Thomsen at Alslev, Johan Kristian at Flensburg, Andreas at Vesterhøjst, Ingeborg, the wife of Peter Henrik Thomsen at Abild, Hans Peter Jessen at Abild, and Karsten Mattiesen at Schleswig. Two of his children had married two brothers of the Thomsen family.

Notes

The records disagree on his age. The census of 1835 gave 41 and that of 1860 gave 66, both consistent with his baptism in 1794, but the census of 1845 gave 57 and his burial entry 69. The baptism register settles the date.