♀Christine Marie Bossen

Christine Marie Bossen (27 December 1829 – 23 June 1911), also recorded as Boesen, was a Danish-born woman of the Duchy of Slesvig, an ancestor of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007) in the Curtis branch of the family. She was his great-great-grandmother: her daughter Bothilda Catharina Jensen (1851–1925) was the mother of Christine Magdalena Thomsen (1883–1961), whose daughter Bernice Reinette Schulz (1905–1993) was Frederic Roger Curtis’s mother.

Early life

She was born at Aventoft, a marsh village near Tønder in the Duchy of Slesvig, then under the Danish crown and today in Germany. The family record names her parents as Niels Jensen (born 1801) and Anne Jensdr (1806–1892), both of Aventoft. That parentage rests on no record: the only sources cited for it are three Massachusetts record collections, a Geneanet tree index and a US family-history book, and the Aventoft register, which would test it, is not among them.

Marriage and family

She married Peter Nikolai Jensen (1819–1894) at Aventoft on 11 May 1850. The couple had six children. By 1860 the family was living at Hostrup, a few miles to the north in Tønder district, where the census recorded her as the wife of the household, Lutheran and married. The Hostrup register for 1863 records the birth of a son, Nicolai Peter, on 18 July and his christening on 2 August, giving the mother’s age as 33, which agrees with her recorded birth date. One of the godmothers was a Maria Boesen of Aventoft, of the same surname and village; the register does not state the relationship.

Later life and death

Her husband was buried at Hostrup in 1894. His burial entry records that five of their children were then living, four of them in America, and that a son, Nicolai, was a building contractor at Rothenkrug (now Rødekro) in Rise parish, near Aabenraa. She followed that son rather than the children who had emigrated. She died a widow at Rothenkrug on 23 June 1911 and was buried at Rise on 28 June, aged, in the register’s reckoning, 81 years and 6 months, which agrees to the month with her recorded birth date. A colourised studio portrait of her in old age survives; the file it came in is labeled 1829–1911, a year the burial register also confirms. The Aventoft registers, which would hold her baptism and marriage and would test the recorded parentage, are in German custody and are outside the Danish national archive’s online holdings.

Notes

Name

The 1863 register spells the surname Boesen in both places it occurs. Bossen, the spelling used in the family record, rested until then only on a census entry too small to be legible. The Rise burial register of 1911 spells it Bossen. Bossen is retained as the primary form and Boesen recorded as an alternative.