♂Peter Nikolai Jensen

Peter Nikolai Jensen (1 January 1820 – 27 April 1894) was a day-labourer and cottager of Jejsing, a village in Hostrup parish near Tønder, in the Duchy of Schleswig. He lived and died there while most of his children left for America, and the register of his burial records that of his five living children, four were in America. He was the great-great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his daughter Bothilda Catharina Jensen (1851–1925), her daughter Christine Magdalena Thomsen (1883–1961) and Christine’s daughter Bernice Reinette Schulz (1905–1993).

Early life

He was born at Jejsing on 1 January 1820 and baptized at Hostrup on 9 January, the son of Laust Jensen (1783–1868) and Catharina Peters. His burial entry names his father as Laust Jensen of Jejsing. He was the middle of three brothers: Jens Peter was born at Jejsing in 1816, and Matthias in 1823; the parish index gives Matthias’s death as 9 May 1831, at the age of seven. Jejsing then lay under the Danish crown. It passed to Prussia in 1864 and returned to Denmark in 1920.

Marriage and family

On 11 May 1850 he married Christine Marie Bossen (1829–1911) at Aventoft, her home village near Tønder, which has been in Germany since 1920. The couple settled at Jejsing, where their six children were born between 1851 and 1872. The Danish census of 1 February 1860 found them there as a Lutheran household of four: Peter, aged 40 and working as a day-laborer, Christine, aged 31, and the two eldest children, Bothilda and Christian. The other four were born after that census.

When a son was baptized in 1863, the register styled Peter an indsidder, a villager who lived in a house without land of his own. One of the godparents was a Maria Boesen of Aventoft, from his wife’s home village. Two of the sons bore the name Peter: Peter Christian Nissen, born in May 1860, and Peter Nikolai, born on 18 July 1863 and baptized as Nicolai Peter.

The children in America

Five of the six children emigrated. Christian Lauritz Jensen (1855–1930) left from Hamburg about 1870 and by 1876 was running a stage service out of Deadwood in the Black Hills of Dakota. Bothilda went to Chicago in 1872 and married Anders Hansen Thomsen there. Peter Christian Nissen also settled in the Black Hills and died at Keystone, South Dakota, in 1914. Hans Christian Anton Jensen (1869–1893) joined Christian in the Black Hills and died at Hot Springs in August 1893, eight months before his father. The youngest, Christine Bothilda Catharine, emigrated in 1894 and settled in Chicago. American records give the birthplace of all of them as Germany, reflecting the Prussian rule of Schleswig after 1864.

Death

Peter Nikolai Jensen died at Jejsing on 27 April 1894 and was buried at Hostrup on 3 May. By then the parish kept its burial register in German. His entry there calls him a Kätner, a cottager, names his parents, records his marriage in 1850 to Christine Marie of Aventoft, and adds that of his children five were living, four of them in America, and that a son, Nicolai, was a building contractor at Rothenkrug, now Rødekro, near Aabenraa. Christine outlived him by seventeen years and died a widow at Rothenkrug in 1911, in the town of the one son who had stayed in Schleswig.

Notes

The Hostrup baptism register settles his birth as 1 January 1820, the date his burial entry also gives; earlier family records had 1819. His age of 40 in the census of February 1860 fits 1820. The same census gives a birthplace for him that has not been deciphered; it does not obviously read Jejsing. A typed index to the Hostrup registers also lists a Peter Nicolai at Jejsing under 21 December 1858, but a later check of the Jejsing births in the years between the known children found none that belonged to this couple, so the index line is not taken as a child of the family.