♂Peter Nicolai Thomsen

Peter Nicolai Thomsen (23 January 1817 – 29 April 1897) was a farmer in North Schleswig, at Tirslund and later at Alslev in the parish of Højst, and the son of Thomas Hinrich Thomsen and Anna Christina Nissen of Lundsgaarde. He was the great-great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his son Anders Hansen Thomsen (1847–1931), his daughter Christine Magdalena Thomsen (1883–1961) and her daughter Bernice Reinette Schulz (1905–1993).

Marriage and family

On 2 December 1842, in Højst church, Peter Nicolay Thomsen, a bachelor of 25 living in Vesterhøjst, married Anna Magdalena Hansen, the daughter of Anders Hansen and Mariana Jacobsen of the same village. The register names his parents as Thomas Hinrich Thomsen and his wife Anna Christina, born Nissen, “auf Lundsgaarde”. Like every couple in those years he had to show a certificate of smallpox vaccination, and his was issued in the town of Schleswig, far to the south, on 8 June 1817. The family was then still living in Angeln, near that town: the 1845 census, in a published transcription, gives his father’s birthplace as Süderbrarup, his mother’s and his elder brother’s as Brodersby, and his younger siblings’ as a parish in the same district. They had moved north to Lundsgaard in Højst parish by 1840. On 11 July 1845 his younger brother Peter Hinrich married Ingeborg Hansen, his wife’s sister, in the same church, so the children of the two couples were double first cousins.

The index of the 1845 census places the family at Tirslund, in the parish of Tislund, with a son Thomas born about 1842. There his son Anders was born on 13 July 1847, and the baptism register calls Peter a farmer. Among the godparents were a Claus Thomsen and his wife of Landsgaard, in Højst parish, most likely his elder brother Claus Peter, who was living at Lundsgaard in 1845. By 1851 the family was farming at Alslev in Højst parish, where the register again calls him a farmer at the baptism of his son Peter Nissen Thomsen. The census of 1860, as transcribed, lists him at Alslev as farmer and head of the household, aged 44, with his wife, seven children and her unmarried brother Carsten Matthiesen Hansen, whom he supported; it gives his birthplace only as the district of Gottorf. Anders emigrated to Chicago in 1872.

He died on 29 April 1897 and was buried at Højst on 5 May 1897, aged 80. The burial entry gives his birth as 23 January 1817 and names his parents, Thomas Hinrich Thomsen and Anna Christina Nissen (written Anna Christine there), and his wife, written Anna Magdalene there. In 1865, when his mother was buried, he was living at Øster-Højst.

Notes

The family tree long gave his birth as about 1825. The marriage register’s age of 25 in December 1842 and his 1817 vaccination point to about 1817, and the 1845 census index gives 1816. The burial record of 1897 gives his birth as 23 January 1817. His own baptism has not yet been found; it is not in the Højst registers for 1816 to 1818, and was probably at Brodersby or in the parish where his younger siblings were born.