♀Christine Magdalena Thomsen

Christine Magdalena Thomsen (29 January 1883 – 6 May 1961) was a Chicago-born daughter of Schleswig immigrants who spent almost her whole life in that city, for many years with her parents living in the same building or under her own roof. She and her husband, married for fifty-seven years, died within months of each other at Vero Beach, Florida, in 1961. She was the grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her daughter Bernice Reinette Schulz (1905–1993).

Early life

Christine was born in Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, on 29 January 1883, the daughter of Anders Hansen Thomsen (1847–1931) and Bothilda Catharina Jensen (1851–1925). Her father was born in 1847 at Heist, in Holstein; her mother was born at Jejsing, a village in Hostrup parish near Tønder, in the Duchy of Schleswig, then under the Danish crown, Prussian from 1864 and part of Denmark again since 1920. Her mother’s father had been a day-laborer at Jejsing. Her parents married and came to America in 1872, and the 1920 census dates her father’s naturalization to 1880. He worked as a teamster in 1880, a coal dealer in 1900, and later as a barn boss, still working for a tea company at seventy-two.

She grew up with one brother, Charles Thomsen (1874–1943), who a family compilation records was the postmaster at the stockyards station. Her mother told the census takers of 1900 and 1910 that she had borne four or five children, only two of whom were living. One of the lost children is known by name: a brother, Christian Martin (1879–1884), listed as Christopher in the 1880 census. The others are not named in any record found. In June 1900 Christine, eighteen and single, was living at home in the Town of Lake district of Chicago’s 30th Ward with her parents and brother.

Marriage and family

On 1 June 1904, in Chicago, she married Frank Frederick William Schulz (1882–1961), a Chicago man of her own age. Their only child, Bernice, was born on 29 November 1905; the 1910 census records Christine as the mother of one child, one living.

In 1910 the Schulzes lived on East 33rd Street in Chicago’s 3rd Ward. Her parents were enumerated in the same building as a separate household, and by 1920 they had moved into the Schulz home, in the 32nd Ward, where the census lists them as Frank’s father-in-law and mother-in-law. Her mother died on 5 April 1925. By 1930 the family was in the 19th Ward, and her widowed father, then about eighty and no longer working, was still living with them; he died on 10 December 1931. Bernice had married Frederic Arthur Curtis in 1924.

The couple were still in Chicago in 1935, 1940 and 1950, and in 1950 her husband, at sixty-seven, was still working a forty-eight-hour week as a shipping clerk for a manufacturer.

Death

The couple later moved to Vero Beach, Indian River County, Florida. Christine died there on 6 May 1961, and an obituary appeared in an Orlando paper on 10 May. She was buried at Vero Beach. Her husband died at Vero Beach just over three months later, on 17 August 1961.

Notes

The 1900 census gives her birth as January 1882; the censuses of 1910, 1920 and 1930 and a Cook County birth index all fit 29 January 1883.