♂Claus Peter Thomsen

Claus Peter Thomsen (19 January 1815 – 28 April 1884) was a farmer and smallholder in Højst parish, North Schleswig, the eldest known son of the farmer Thomas Hinrich Thomsen and Anna Christina Nissen. He was born at Brodersby in Angeln before the family moved north to Lundsgaard, and was the elder brother of Peter Nicolai Thomsen, the great-great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007).

Early life

The census of 1845, in a published transcription, lists him at his parents’ farm at Lundsgaard, aged 30 and unmarried, born at Brodersby in the district of Schleswig; an index of the 1840 census gives his birth year as 1814. His own death entry, written nearly forty years later, gives the exact day, 19 January 1815, and it is that date the site uses. In July 1847 a Claus Thomsen of Landsgaard, in Højst parish, stood godfather with his wife at the baptism of his brother Peter Nicolai’s son Anders at Tislund. He is very likely that man.

Marriage and family

On 3 September 1846 he married Katrine Margrete Terp, the daughter of Nis Hansen Terp, a smallholder, and Elsebe Bejer of Himmerup in Hellevad parish. By 1861 Claus Peter held the farm at Lundsgaard himself. Katrine Margrete died there on 3 June 1861, aged 46, and was buried at Højst on 8 June. Her burial entry records seven children of the marriage, of whom a daughter, Elsebe Johanne, had died in March 1850; the six surviving children, none of them yet confirmed, were Anne Kristine, Tomas Hendrik, Elsebe Johanne, Katrine Margrete, Neta Jakobine and Nis Hansen Thomsen.

His own death entry says that he married a second time, on 23 June 1864, Anne Cathrine Jacobsen. The children the entry mentions have not yet been added to the tree. The entry counts four living children from the first marriage and six from the second, the youngest of them a child of eighteen months.

Death

Claus Peter Thomsen died on 28 April 1884 and was buried at Højst on 3 May. The parish register, which gives the cause of death in these years, records pneumonia. It calls him a Häusler, a cottager with a small holding, at Dolgaard, not at Lundsgaard; the same entry names his father as the late proprietor of Lundsgaard. It names his mother as Anne Christine née Nissen but, unlike his father, does not describe her as deceased; she would have been about ninety, and no record of her death has been found.

Notes

Earlier records gave his birth as about 1814, from the census indexes; the death register’s 19 January date is preferred because it states the day.