Hansen meets second cousin in Denmark

By Bill Clark

Merle and Shirley Hansen of Tyler received a very special gift, a trip to Denmark and Germany, from their daughter and son-in-law, Nancy and Donn Hagmann. Shirley said it all started one weekend over a year ago when she was showing some old photos to Donn and Nancy when they were in Tyler visiting. "I showed them a picture of my dad with his brothers who were born in Denmark," Shirley said, "and it sparked Donn’s interest." Donn started researching the family name. The Hagmann’s Christmas gift to Nancy’s parents turned out to be the gift of a lifetime. Through the research they discovered that Shirley had a second cousin in Denmark she had never met and with some unique circumstances the cousins finally met in Denmark while the couples were touring the country.

The following story was published in the "American Letter," a magazine published three times annually by the Danish Immigrant Museum in Elk Horn, Iowa, one of the contacts Donn made while doing his research prior to going on the trip.

"Searching for Kristensens"

It is not uncommon for the Family History and Genealogy Center (FHGC) to be contacted by individuals planning a trip to Denmark who need help identifying localities, especially villages or parish churches, associated with their immigrant ancestors.

Generally speaking this task is an easy one and after a bit of sleuthing we are able to provide photographs or maps showing relevant sites to include in their itinerary. Several times a year, however, we are contacted by individuals going to Denmark who wish us to find living Danish relatives they can meet during their stay.

The ease or difficulty of doing this depends on many factors, including the number of years or generations that have elapsed since the migration, the size of the immigrant’s family of origin, whether other members of the family emigrated or stayed in Denmark, whether they lived in a rural or urban area, and, not least of all, whether there is a Danish relative interested in the extended family history or meeting an American cousin.

This February Donn Hagmann of Shorewood contacted us about trying to find relatives of his wife’s immigrant grandfather. Peder Kristensen was a member of the Danish Coast Guard in 1927 when he was given permission to leave the country. He was found on the passenger list of the S/S Hellig Olav, which arrived in New York on May 25, 1927. Peder indicated that he was on his way to the home of an uncle, Stephen Petersen in Chicago, Ill.

Five years later Peder, now known as Peter B. Christensen, married Aster Jeppsen in Tyler. He was a resident there until his early death at the age of 57. His obituary indicated that he was survived by a brother, Chris, in Los Angeles, Cal. as well as four sisters and three brothers in Denmark, thus seven possible threads to follow.

Peder’s 1900 birth record was found in the church records of Bjergby parish on the island of Mors in Thisted County. This northwestern area of Jutland is quite rural and relatively sparsely populated. This can be advantageous in finding relatives, since it is more likely that people might recognize the names of older family members if they stayed in the area.

Subsequent research showed that Peder’s parents, Jens Kristensen and Else Boubjerg, were married in 1897. The couple had ten children born between 1897 and 1916 in the two parishes and were apparently living in the village of Bjergby in the latter years although the family was not found enumerated in the parish then.

Danish law regarding the privacy of vital records generally extends for 100 years, so additional means of identifying living relatives had to be found. A query was placed on the national Danish genealogical message board asking for descendants of the Kristensen siblings of Bjergby. No response.

In rural areas local historical societies and newspapers can be invaluable means of communication and information. At this time we enlisted the services of one of the FHGC’s Danish volunteers, Erik Hogsbro Ostergaard, who eagerly took up the assignment. Erik recontacted the archives and was told, after inquires had been made with several older local residents of Bjergby that while the parents had continued to live in the village no immediate family lived there now. Erik then wrote to Anders Holmgaard, the editor of the Morso Folkeblad, asking to put in an inquiry. The resulting article, "American family seeks roots on Mors," and accompanying photograph elicited responses from several individuals who were familiar with descendants of Else Boubjerg’s siblings. They were able to confirm that several of Peder’s brothers and sisters died without children and that no immediate family members remained nearby.

In early May, Donn, his wife Nancy, and his parents-in-law landed in Copenhagen and drove up to Mors, where they visited the newspaper office before being introduced to Arne Sandal. Arne’s wife, Kirsten, had researched her husband’s family, so knew that Arne’s grandfather was the brother of Else Boubjerg Kristensen, and hence that her husband and Donn’s mother-in-law, Shirley Hansen, were second cousins.

The Sandals drove the Hagmann-Hansen visitors around the area, including the cemetery of Ansgar church, where they were fortunate in locating the graves and tombstones of Else and Jens Kristensen, dead over a half-century. Peder had apparently added the middle initial "B" to his name from his mother’s family name after arriving in America.

A follow-up article in the Morso Folkeblad chronicled the cousins’ encounter, and the creation of a friendly and hopefully enduring link between distant relatives on two continents. And as an interesting aside, Shirley’s daughter Nancy discovered that she shared the same birth date as her great-grandmother Else!