♀Bothilda Catharina Jensen

Bothilda Catharina Jensen (27 September 1851 – 5 April 1925) was a Danish-born emigrant from the Schleswig village of Jejsing who settled in Chicago in 1872 and lived there for the rest of her life. A family history adds that she reached Chicago at twenty-one and that the man she would marry followed her across the Atlantic. Several of her brothers and her youngest sister also settled in America. She was the great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her daughter Christine Magdalena Thomsen (1883–1961) and granddaughter Bernice Reinette Schulz (1905–1993).

Early life

Bothilda was born at Jejsing, in Hostrup parish in the district of Tønder, the eldest of the six children of Peter Nikolai Jensen (1819–1894) and Christine Marie Bossen (1829–1911). Jejsing lay in the Duchy of Schleswig, then under the Danish crown; it passed to Prussia in 1864, when she was twelve, and returned to Denmark in 1920. The Danish census of February 1860 finds the family in Jejsing village as a household of four: her father, a day-laborer, her mother, who had been born at Aventoft, Bothilda, aged eight, and her brother Christian, aged five. The other four children were born after that census. The youngest, Christine Bothilda Catharine, born in 1872, the year Bothilda left, was named after her.

Chicago

Bothilda arrived in America in 1872 and married Anders Hansen Thomsen (1847–1931), born at Heist in Holstein, the same year, in Chicago according to the family history. That history records that Anders came to America following her, and also to stay out of the German army, and that she opened her own sewing shop in the downtown area. By 1880 the couple were living in Hyde Park, then a separate township south of the city. The census that year lists Anders as a teamster, her as keeping house under the name “Matilda”, their sons Charley, aged six, and Christopher, aged eleven months, and a Danish boarder named Hansen who drove a team. The 1920 census gives 1880 as the year both she and Anders were naturalized.

She bore four or five children, according to the censuses of 1900 and 1910, and only two were still living in 1900: Charles (1874–1943), who became postmaster at the stockyards station according to the family history, and Christine Magdalena, born in 1883. The baby of 1880 appears in the Cook County death register as Christian Martin Thomsen. He was born at Grand Crossing, a neighborhood of Hyde Park, and died on 4 November 1884 aged five. He was buried at Oak Woods Cemetery, where the rest of the family would later lie. The other children who died have not been identified.

According to the family history, Anders ran a drayage business, supplying horses and wagons for hauling. In 1900 he was a coal dealer and the family lived in the Town of Lake district of Chicago, where Bothilda was listed as a houseworker. The family history says her brothers in South Dakota often called Anders out to help with their stagecoach business at Deadwood. A 1987 historic-building nomination confirms that her brother Christian Lauritz Jensen set up a stage service in Deadwood in 1876. Christian’s son Leslie Jensen was elected governor of South Dakota in 1936.

Later years and death

Christine married Frank Frederick William Schulz in 1904. By 1910 the two households shared a building on East 33rd Street, the Schulzes in one family unit and Bothilda and Anders in the next, and by 1920 the older couple lived in the Schulz home as mother-in-law and father-in-law. The family history preserves a picture of her in these years through her granddaughter Bernice. She was a very large woman who sat for hours in a rocking chair in the kitchen with needlework in her lap, and she was always there, with a snack ready, when Bernice came home from school.

Bothilda died in Chicago on 5 April 1925. Her death notice in the Chicago Tribune of 7 April calls her the beloved wife of Anders H. Thomsen and names her son and her daughter Christine, Mrs. Schulz. The funeral was held at the family home on Michigan Avenue on the Wednesday, under the auspices of a chapter of the Order of the Eastern Star^W, a fraternal society open to women and to Freemasons. She was buried on 8 April at Oak Woods Cemetery. Her Illinois death certificate names her parents as Peter Nicolai Jensen and Christine Bosson, in agreement with the Danish records. Anders survived her by six years.

Notes

The family history also calls her the first of her family to come to America, but her brother Christian’s records put his own emigration from Hamburg in 1869 or 1870, two or three years before hers. The family history gives her death as April 1929. The date used here, 5 April 1925, is the one the records support; the 1930 census, which lists Anders as a widower, fits either year. American censuses gave her name as Matilda, Butilda, Bothilde and Mothilde. The 1880 census gives her birthplace as Denmark, but those from 1900 onward give Germany and, where asked, her mother tongue as German. The later birthplace reflects the Prussian rule of Schleswig after 1864, but the records do not explain the language answer. The 1900 census counted five children born and two living, and the 1910 census counted four and two, so the exact number she bore is uncertain.