♂Anders Hansen Thomsen

Anders Hansen Thomsen (13 July 1847 – 10 December 1931) was a Chicago teamster, coal dealer and stable boss, born in the duchy of Schleswig, who came to America in 1872 and spent his working life with horses. A family history written by his great-grandson adds that he went into the drayage business, hiring out horses and wagons, and that his brothers-in-law in South Dakota often called him out to help with their business, a stagecoach line out of Deadwood. He was the great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his daughter Christine Magdalena Thomsen (1883–1961) and her daughter Bernice Reinette Schulz (1905–1993).

Early life and emigration

Anders was born on 13 July 1847 in the parish of Tislund, north of Tønder in the Duchy of Schleswig^W, and baptized in Tislund church on 22 August. The register names his parents as Peter Nicolai Thomsen, a farmer, and his wife Magdalene Hansen. In 1845 they had been living in the village of Tirslund, and by 1851, when his younger brother Peter Nissen Thomsen was born, they were farming at Alslev in the neighboring parish of Højst. The 1860 Danish census lists Anders there, in the Alslev household of his parents, on 1 February 1860. He was the third child of the couple. Thomas Henrik (born about 1842) and Mariane (about 1845) were older, and the Højst baptism register shows six younger children born at Alslev between 1849 and 1859: Anna Christina, Peter Nissen, Anne Christine, Jørgen Henrik, Anton Peter and Antoline Petrine. A second daughter was given the name Anne Christine in 1853, four years after Anna Christina. The 1880 census gave his birthplace as Denmark, and the family history says he joked that he was never sure whether he came from Germany or Denmark. The joke had a basis: Schleswig was ruled from Copenhagen when he was born, passed to Prussia after the war of 1864, and his home district became part of Denmark again in 1920. According to his daughter, as the same history tells it, he came to America to follow the woman he meant to marry and to stay out of the German army.

That woman was Bothilda Catharina Jensen (1851–1925), from the village of Jejsing in the Tønder district of Schleswig. The family history says she was the first of her family to come to America, arriving in Chicago at 21 and opening her own sewing shop downtown. Both came in 1872, and they married that year. The 1920 census gives 1880 as the year he became a citizen.

Chicago

In the 1880 census the family appears under the name Thompson, with Anders as “Andrew”, a teamster in Hyde Park Township, which was a separate town until Chicago annexed it in 1889. A Danish boarder named Hansen, also a teamster, lived with them. By 1900 Anders was a coal dealer in the Town of Lake district of Chicago. By 1910 he was a barn boss running a stable, and he and Bothilda were living in the same building on East 33rd Street as their daughter Christine and her husband, Frank Frederick William Schulz. By 1920 the couple had moved into the Schulz household. Anders was 72 and still working as a barn boss, now for a tea company.

The family history remembers him as a man who loved horses and gambling, and who doctored his own animals, treating their cuts and bruises himself. His great-grandson wrote that Anders was “a person of whom I was very fond.”

Family

Anders and Bothilda had four or five children. In 1900 Bothilda told the census she had borne five, and in 1910 four, with two living each time. Their son Charles (1874–1943) was, according to the family history, postmaster at the stockyards station. Christian Martin, born in 1879, died in 1884, and their daughter Christine was born in 1883. Bothilda died in 1925. In 1930 Anders was a widower living with the Schulzes. He died in Chicago on 10 December 1931 and was buried two days later at Oak Woods Cemetery.

Notes

The 1994 family history gives his death as 1933 and his wife’s as 1929. The records give 10 December 1931 and 5 April 1925. Some trees give his birth as 13 July 1848 at Flensburg, but three census age columns fit 1847 exactly and none fits 1848, and the Tislund baptism register settles it at 13 July 1847. Earlier versions of the family tree placed his birth at Heist in Holstein, a town far to the south; the register shows he was born and baptized in Tislund. The records do not name the other children counted in 1900.