♂Hans Arentzen

Hans Arentzen was a resident of Rørkær, in Hostrup parish near Tønder, in the Duchy of Schleswig^W, from the 1730s until his death in 1762. He was the sixth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his daughter Kirsten Hansen.

Family

Hans and his wife Els had a son, Matthies, baptized at Hostrup on 7 August 1737, and a daughter baptized on 14 August 1740 whose name the register leaves blank. The register describes each of their children as a child of Hans Arentzen of Rørkær. At the August 1740 baptism the mother is named as “Els Hanses”, the parish’s usual way of naming a wife by her husband’s first name. Three more daughters are known only from their burials: one aged a year and a half, buried on 18 April 1740, and two, aged six and ten, buried a week apart on 12 and 19 February 1741. In little over ten months, between April 1740 and February 1741, the couple buried three daughters.

Their daughter Kirsten was baptized at Hostrup on 16 April 1743, the register naming her father as Hans Arentzen “von Rorkar”. When she married Wolle Wollesen, a cottager at Rørkær, in Hostrup church on 29 September 1764, the register named her as the daughter of Hans Arentzen and Els Petersen, the entry that gives Els her surname.

Death

Hans Arentzen of Rørkær was buried at Hostrup on 2 May 1762, aged 70, so he was born about 1692. Hans and Els married before the parish’s surviving registers begin in 1734, so neither their marriage nor his baptism is recorded in them.