A Trip to the Big Apple to look at Socialist Cheesecake

Doing family history can take you to lots of exotic places, both geographic and emotional. Our recent trip to New York City had some of both. One moment, we were in the Rare Book Reading Room of New York Public Library's Schomburg Center struggling to stifle ourselves over the photo on the cover of the May 1919 issue of The Crusader, and then a few hours later, we found ourselves ensconced in Riverside Church's cozy columbarium, surrounded by marble plaques marking the final resting places of ash-filled urns. We weren't just being weird: the ashes of two of Jane's relatives are in there.

What a trip—but first things first: our Crusader cover girl.

Hamlet's Grandchildren!

One of the long-unanswered questions about Jane's ancestry was the Danish connection via the then-Danish-now-U.S. Virgin Islands. To recap a bit, Jane's great-grandmother, Mathilde Dagmar Christensen, was born in St. Thomas to a local woman of color, Adeline Diguise (the spellings vary), and a Danish police officer serving in St. Thomas. That story was told earlier in this blog.

But at that point, I could go no further than the name of Mathilde's father, Jørgen Peder Ferdinand Christensen.