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. 

Jane's great-grandmother, Matilde Dagmar, had several half-brothers in St. Croix who carried the family name Bønsøe—another distinctly Danish name. A few weeks ago, I received an unexpected email from a Bønsøe in Denmark who was trying to track down the descendants of the St. Croix Bønsøes, who had themselves emigrated to the United States, just as Mathilde Dagmar had.

At least one of those emigré Bønsøes had settled in Boston, married a young woman who was also from St. Croix, and they had had a son. My Danish correspondent was in search of those descendants—but also suggested that I visit a Danish family history website where English-speakers in search of Danish family connections can post their queries.

So I visited that website, posted my query about Jørgen Peder Ferdinand Christensen, and within a few days and thanks to the generous Danish souls at that website, I knew much more about Jane's Danish great-great-grandfather.

Jørgen Peder Ferdinand Christensen was born around 1836 in Helsingør, about 30 miles north of Copenhagen. According to recently-digitized West Indian records of the Danish government, he was deployed on 8 Apr 1860. He served first among the "service/supply" troops in Copenhagen, but then my correspondent interpreted his record as having been dismissed(!) from that post and sent off to St. Thomas to serve as a policeman. And Jane's great-grandmother's baptismal record in St. Thomas indeed identifies her father as a policeman named Jørgen Peder Ferdinand Christensen, so the link seems solidly confirmed.

Christensen returned to Copenhagen in 1869, the year Jane's great-grandmother was born. The 1880 Danish census records him living in Copenhagen with his wife, Karen Marie (Andresen) Christensen. His birthplace is listed as Helsingør and his occupation is "Snedkersvend"—a carpenter. He got married in 1877; his wife is listed elsewhere in the census entry for the household.

When subsequent census searches turned up no further trace of Jørgen Peder Ferdinand, I looked for Karen Marie Christensen. I found her in the 1885 census, where she is listed as a widow ("Enke") and her occupation is "host-housekeeper."

The entire report/exchange at the Danish family history website may be seen by clicking here.

For Jørgen Peder Ferdinand Christensen to have left St. Thomas the year his daughter was born means that, almost certainly, she never knew her father at all. There is so far no record of his returning to visit or otherwise contacting them in any way. Adeline Diguise, the mother of his two mixed-race children, died in St. Croix in 1886 and was buried in an unmarked grave in Christiansted.

What Jørgen Peder Ferdinand Christensen did was far from unprecedented: indeed, the practice of European men taking concubines from amongst the enslaved African women was so common that the Danish clergy and missionaries appealed to King Frederik V of Denmark to abolish the distinction between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" children so that they might all baptized and instructed in Christianity. And so it was done in 1755, and that's why Jane's great-grandmother's name can be found in the parish registries as having been baptized and confirmed as a good Lutheran, despite the fact that her parents were not and could not be married. (Her Crucian great-grandfather, Frank McCabe, was baptized in Frederiksted, but as a Roman Catholic.)

And what of these mixed race children? Well, in 1789, a young mixed-race man named Hans Jonatan and his enslaved African mother, Emilia Regina, were brought from St. Croix to Copenhagen by the family who owned her. His owner died in Denmark and "bequeathed" him to the widow; but Hans Jonatan escaped and then sued, claiming that he could not be "bequeathed" because slavery had been abolished in Denmark and he was therefore free. He lost and was sentenced to be returned to the West Indies; whereupon he escaped to Iceland and lived a successful and perhaps even happy life as the first person of color to live in Iceland.

He of course was far from the only such offspring. Through the miracle of Google Translate, I was pleased to learn about a Danish journalist named Alex Frank Larsen, who has explored some of the history of Danish slave-holding in the West Indies, and in particular, the succeeding generations of mixed-race offspring and their apparently uneasy relations with the Danes and Denmark. If I understand correctly, there is a TV documentary accompanied by a book. They're both called Slavernes slægt, which comes to English via Google as "Slave generations" or "Slave families." And it has been issued with English subtitles under the title of "Slaves in Our Family." I've ordered a copy from the Danish distributor, the Danish West Indies Society.

Jørgen Peder Ferdinand Christensen died of pneumonia in Copenhagen on 6 May 1884, leaving no other children, so far as we know.

Oh yes: Hamlet's grandchildren. The name of Jørgen Peder Ferdinand Christensen's birthplace, Helsingør, has come to English as Elsinore, home of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.