♂Laust Jensen

Laust Jensen (baptized 25 April 1790 – 21 July 1868) was a smith’s son from Henne parish on the west coast of Jutland who settled in Hostrup parish, near Tønder in the Duchy of Schleswig, where he married in 1815 and worked as a shoemaker and cottager for the rest of his life. He was the third great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his son Peter Nikolai Jensen (1820–1894).

Origins

Laust was baptized at Henne church on 25 April 1790, the son of “Jens Pedersen Smed og Mette Andersdatter” of Nederfidde, a hamlet of the parish; one of his godfathers was a Laust Jensen of Kløvgaard. His father, the village smith, died in 1798. The census of 1801 found Laust, aged 11, still at Nederfidde with his widowed mother, Mette Marie Andersdatter, and an elder sibling. His surname follows the Danish patronymic custom: as the son of Jens he was Jensen.

Marriage and family

On 9 December 1815, at Rørkær in Hostrup parish, he married Catharina Peters, a local woman born in 1784. The register, kept in German as the Schleswig registers then were, describes him as a bachelor from Jutland, the son of Jens Petersen and Metta née Andresen, and her as the daughter of the late Peter Nielsen, a landless lodger (Inste), and his late wife Agatha. The bride’s surname, Peters, is a patronymic from her father’s given name.

The couple had three sons, all born at the village of Jejsing in the same parish: Jens Peter in 1816, Peter Nikolai on 1 January 1820 and Matthias in 1823. The parish index gives Matthias’s death as 1831, and Jens Peter’s fate is not recorded. Peter Nikolai, the son through whom the line runs, was baptized on 9 January 1820, and his own burial entry in 1894 still identifies him as the son of “Laust Jensen in Jeising” (Jejsing) and Catharina née Peters.

Later life and death

The census of 1845 lists him at Hostrup as a Schuster, a shoemaker, born in Henne parish in Ribe county. By 1860 he was at Solderup in the same parish, holding a quarter share of a Kaadnersted, a cottager’s holding, and the census that year names his birthplace as Hede, in Henne parish. He died at Solderup on 21 July 1868 and was buried on 26 July. By then Schleswig had passed from the Danish crown to Prussia, after the war of 1864; it returned to Denmark in 1920. The burial register calls him Ehemann, a married man, but the entry as read does not say to whom. The census of 1845 already lists him with a wife of a different name, and no record of Catharina’s death has been found, so it is not known when she died or whether she was still his wife in 1868.

Notes

His own later records consistently make him about seven years older than his baptism does: 61 in 1845, 77 in 1860, and 85 at his burial, where the pastor wrote that he was born “according to report” in Jutland on 26 May 1783. No Laust was baptized to a Jens and an Andersdatter at Henne in 1782–1784, and the Nederfidde household of 1787 had no child of that name; the baptism of 1790, and his age of 11 in the 1801 census, are taken here as his birth. Nederfidde (at his baptism) and Hede (in the 1860 census) are both places within Henne parish.

A family chart compiled in 1994 gave his birthplace as “Aayabe” or “Aagabe” in Jutland. No such place exists; the name is a misreading of nach Angaben, “according to report”, in the burial register. The Hostrup index lists several other men named Laust Jensen at Rørkær, Jejsing and Solderup, so records for this Laust are matched on their dates and places, not on the name alone.