♂Peter Nikolai Jensen

Peter Nikolai Jensen (born 18 July 1863) was a builder at Rothenkrug in Schleswig and the one of six children who did not emigrate. His father’s burial entry of 1894 records that four of the family’s five living children were in America, and names him as the fifth. He was the great-grand-uncle of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), the brother of Roger’s great-grandmother Bothilda Catharina Jensen (1851–1925).

Early life

He was born on 18 July 1863 at Jejsing, a village in Hostrup parish near Tønder, in the Duchy of Schleswig^W, and was baptized on 2 August. The register entered him as Nicolai Peter, the son of Peter Nikolai Jensen (1820–1894), styled an indsidder, and Christine Marie Bossen (1829–1911), who was given as 33. He was the fourth of their six children. One of the godparents was Maria Boesen of Aventoft, from his mother’s home village. Schleswig passed from Denmark to Prussia in 1864, the year after his birth, and returned to Denmark in 1920.

Rothenkrug

While Bothilda, Christian, Peter Christian Nissen, Hans and Christine left for America, Peter Nikolai stayed. When his father was buried at Hostrup on 3 May 1894, the register called him Nicolai Jensen, a Bauunternehmer, a building contractor, at Rothenkrug, now Rødekro, near Aabenraa. A compiled genealogy from 1994 gives his wife as Terese Andrea Lindskov of Vonsild, born in 1866, and their marriage as 1 January 1887 at Jejsing. It calls him the son who stayed behind, and records no children.

His widowed mother, Christine Marie, died at Rothenkrug in 1911 and was buried at Rise. The records give no date of death for him.

Notes

One name, two men

The tree once gave him a birth in 1860 and a death on 14 May 1914 at Keystone, South Dakota. Both belong to his brother Peter Christian Nissen Jensen (born 1860), who emigrated to the Black Hills. The Hostrup baptism entry of 1863 settles his own birth, and the 1994 genealogy says he remained in Denmark. The burial entry of 1894 names the contractor only as Nicolai Jensen of Rothenkrug. The identification with this son follows from the count of five living children, four of them in America, and from the 1994 account of the one who stayed.