Saturday, August 24, 2013

Digitized Danish parish registers, part 2

jens poulsen sidse larsdatter sorterup denmark
The beginning of the entry for the marriage of  and Sidse (Larsdatter) Poulsen, Sorterup, Slagelse, Sjælland, Denmark, April 15, 1856.

First off, sorry I got off my blogging schedule again. I just moved into a new apartment, so the past couple weeks have been busy with cleaning, packing, and unpacking.

In my last blog post, I promised I'd talk about what I found in the Danish parish registers, so I'm going to wrap those up for the time being with this blog post. I always bounce all over the place as I work on my family tree and sometimes that means I leave something unfinished while I pick up something else. So in the future, I'm not going to make any promises about what my posts will be about.

My great-great-grandmother Caroline Mary (Jensen) Gotsche was born in Sorterup, Slagelse, Sjælland, Denmark on January 5, 1867. The church still exists and has a website, featuring photos of the church interior. All of the items shown are old enough to have been there when Caroline lived there. (The second link opens a PDF file.) Caroline's mother was also born in Sorterup, while her father was born in the nearby parish of Nordrup, Slagelse, Sjælland, Denmark, and the family lived in the parish of Finderup, Kalundborg, Sjælland, Denmark for a time, so those are the three parishes where I searched.

jens poulsen poul nielsen mariane nordrup denmark
The baptism record of Jens Poulsen, born May 7, 1825 in Nordrup, Slagelse, Sjælland, Denmark. On the right are his parents' names: Poul Nielsen and Mariane. Poul Nielsen and Mariane Henriette Lund were my great-great-great-great-grandparents.

The family I was searching for consisted of Jens Poulsen and his wife Sidse (Larsdatter) Poulsen, who had six biological children: Mariane (Jensen) Nelson, Nels Jensen, Maren Sophie (Poulsen) Jensen, Caroline, and Laura Kathrine Margrethe (Jensen) Thompson. In the traditional Danish naming system, the children are given their father's first name as a surname. So all of the children were born with the surname Jensen (son of Jens) after their father Jens Poulsen. In turn, Jens' father was named Poul Nielsen. Sidse Larsdatter had the feminine form of the surname (datter = daughter).

In the parish registers, I found the baptism records for all six children and both parents, as well as the marriage record for Jens and Sidse. I also completely accidentally stumbled across a record for the baptism of a girl named Ellen Larsdatter, Sidse's sister.

Thanks to these records, I've confirmed the birth dates of my great-great-grandmother Caroline and her siblings and parents. I've also found out the names of Jens and Sidse's parents, and gotten a start on reconstructing Sidse's family by finding her sister. I'm sure there are many more records for my family that I haven't seen yet, and I look forward to finding them.

P.S. You can click on the images above to make them larger.

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