♀Christine Bothilda Catharine Jensen

Christine Bothilda Catharine Jensen (15 May 1872 – 22 December 1972) was a Schleswig-born emigrant who settled in Chicago in 1894 and lived to be a hundred. She was the youngest of the six children of Peter Nikolai Jensen (1820–1894) and Christine Marie Bossen (1829–1911), and the great-grand-aunt of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), the sister of his great-grandmother Bothilda Catharina Jensen (1851–1925).

Early life

She was born on 15 May 1872 at Jejsing, a village in Hostrup parish near Tønder, in the Duchy of Schleswig^W, and was baptized on 2 June as Christine Bothilde Catharine Laurentine. Her sister Bothilda had left for Chicago that year; a family history of 1994 says she was named for her. Schleswig had passed from Denmark to Prussia in 1864 and returned to Denmark in 1920, and American records give her birthplace as Germany, in one case as Tondern, the German name of Tønder.

Chicago

She came to the United States in 1894. According to the Cook County marriage index, she married Christian Petersen Dierks (1862–1947) in Chicago on 2 March 1895. He was a teamster from Tønder who had emigrated in 1888 and been naturalized at the Cook County court in December 1893. They had two daughters, Sarah and Bertha Pearl. In 1900 the family rented a house in Chicago, and in 1910 the Dierkses and her sister Bothilda’s household lived in the same ward of the city.

By 1930 Christian was a hauling contractor and the couple owned a house at 4305 North Lincoln Street, which they shared with Sarah’s family while Pearl taught in a public school. That August the couple and Pearl landed at New York from Bremen on the liner Europa^W, all three carrying passports issued in April. Christian died in Chicago on 21 March 1947.

Later years

In February 1949, aged 76, she sailed with Pearl from Honolulu to San Francisco on the Lurline^W. She died on 22 December 1972, a few months after her hundredth birthday. Her obituary in the Chicago Tribune of 28 December named her daughters Pearl and Mrs. Sarah D. Heidbrink and eight great-grandchildren, and announced a private funeral and a memorial service at the First Congregational Church in Evanston. The 1994 family history gives Evanston as the place of her death.

Notes

The ages given for her in the censuses of 1900 to 1930, on the 1930 and 1949 passenger lists and in the marriage index all fit a birth on 15 May 1872. The census of 1940 understates her age by seven years and her husband’s by the same seven. The 1949 passenger list carries the date “3-2-94 Chicago” against her naturalization. It is most likely her wedding date misremembered by a year, since the marriage index gives the ages of groom and bride as 32 and 22, which fit 1895 and not 1894.