♂Wolle Wollesen

Wolle Wollesen (about 1728 – 1 May 1792) was a cottager at Rørkær, in Hostrup parish near Tønder in the Duchy of Schleswig^W, the son of a man from Varde in Jutland, across the border in the kingdom of Denmark. He was the fifth great-grandfather of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through his son Hans Wollesen (born 1773).

Life

Wolle’s age at death puts his birth about 1728. His marriage entry names his parents as Wolle Frösig “of Warde in Jutland” and Apolonia, born Sørens; Warde is Varde, a market town in the diocese of Ribe, then part of the kingdom rather than the duchy. The records do not say when or why the family came south. Wolle used his patronymic, Wollesen, and the by-name Frösig, sometimes both together, and the registers of Hostrup enter his children under either name.

On 29 September 1764, described as an Inste (a cottager without land) at Rørkær, he married Kirstin, the daughter of Hans and Els Petersen, in Hostrup church. Their first child, a daughter baptized on 17 March 1765, was entered in the register as Ablon, a short form of Apolonia, the name of Wolle’s mother.

A family of eleven

Kirsten bore eleven children at Rørkær over the next twenty years, and every baptism in Hostrup church names the father as the cottager Wolle Wollesen Frösig. After Apolonia came Anna Maria (1766), Ester (1768), a son Hans (1770), a second Hans (1771), a third Hans (1773), Matthias (1775), Søren (1777), Ogtha Kirstina (1779), Mette Maria (1782) and, last, a son Wolle, born on 8 January 1784.

Five of the eleven died young. The first Hans, born in February 1770, lived nine weeks, and the second Hans, born in April 1771, died the next April at the age of one. Mette Maria died in January 1783 aged eighteen weeks. Ester was fifteen when she was buried on 8 April 1784, three months after her youngest brother’s birth, and Søren was eleven when he died in April 1788. The name Hans had been given twice before it stayed with the boy born in 1773, the one through whom the line descends.

Death

Wolle Wollesen Frösig, “formerly a cottager in Rørkær”, died on 1 May 1792 and was buried at Hostrup on 6 May, aged 64. The burial entry records that he left his widow Kirsten, born Hansen, and six children, among them Hans, Matthias, Kirstina and Wolle. The six are the six then living, listed in order of birth: Apolonia, Anna Maria, Hans, Matthias, Ogtha Kirstina and Wolle.

Notes

The burial entry’s names for the first, second and fifth of the six children could not be read with certainty. They are matched to Apolonia, Anna Maria and the first part of Ogtha Kirstina’s name by the order of birth and by the six children then alive.

The child born on 2 April 1771 is entered as a son, Hans, in the burial register and in the parish’s name index. The baptism entry itself is hard to read and calls the child a daughter, so the name and sex of this child remain uncertain.