♀Anna Magdaline Hansen

Anna Magdaline Hansen (born 3 March 1819) was a farmer’s wife in the parish of Højst, in the Duchy of Schleswig^W, the daughter of Anders Hansen and Mariana Jacobsen of Vesterhøjst. She was the great-great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her son Anders Hansen Thomsen (1847–1931), his daughter Christine Magdalena Thomsen (1883–1961) and her daughter Bernice Reinette Schulz (1905–1993).

Early life

She was born on 3 March 1819 in the village of Vesterhøjst and baptized on 10 March in Højst church, as Anna Magdalena Hansen, the lawful daughter of Anders Hansen and his wife Mariana, born Jacobs. The German-language register names three godparents, among them Thomas Matthiesen of Vesterhøjst.

Marriage and family

On 2 December 1842, in Højst church, she married Peter Nicolai Thomsen, a bachelor then living in Vesterhøjst. The marriage register, which names both sets of parents, gives her age as 24 and records, as it did for every couple in those years, the certificate of smallpox vaccination each of them had to produce: hers was issued at Løgumkloster on 31 December 1822.

The couple farmed. The index of the 1845 census places the household at Tirslund, in the parish of Tislund, with a son Thomas born about 1842. Their son Anders was born there on 13 July 1847 and baptized in Tislund church, where his father was entered as a farmer and she as Magdalene Hansen. By 1851 the family was back in Højst parish, farming at Alslev, where their son Peter Nissen Thomsen was born on 21 February. The census of 1860, as transcribed, finds the family on the farm at Alslev with seven children, from Thomas, aged 18, to Antholine Petrea, aged one, and with her unmarried brother Carsten, whom her husband supported. Her father, Anders Hansen, spent his last years at Alslev and died there in March 1861. Anders left for America in 1872 and settled in Chicago.

Her husband died on 29 April 1897, after almost 55 years of marriage, and she lived on as a widow at Øster-Højst and from 1903 at Seth, in the parish of Ubjerg.

She died at Seth on 7 August 1905, aged 86, of old age, in the house of her son-in-law Christen Nielsen. She was buried at Ubjerg on 11 August 1905.

Notes

Earlier versions of the family tree gave her birth as about 1827. Her baptism register gives 3 March 1819, which agrees with the 1845 census index. The marriage register’s age of 24 is a year too high: she was 23 in December 1842. An online index gives her death as 1 August 1905; the Ubjerg register entry gives 7 August, and her burial followed on 11 August.