I started working on looking into a 5th great-aunt, Ane Jensdatter, sister to my 5th great-grandfather, Niels Jensen. Not much was known about her.
I started seeing some details emerge in some probate records in the area and, along with others, put her marriage(s) and families together.
My first review of the work was described this way:
"Ane Jensdatter - what we know, and what I did to come up with the rest of the details: She is listed in the 1800 probate record of her uncle, Niels Jørgensen, dated 22/26 March 1800, Sorø Akademie-Holbæk, along with her father and siblings and many of her family. That is pretty certain. That is how she was first put into FamilySearch. It was guessed that she was born about 1718, which I question (details at the end). She is listed there as deceased and as having been married to Lars Pedersen of Kirke Flinterup, with the children: Ole Rasmussen (of Egerup), Peder Larsen (of Kr. Flinterup) and Sidse Larsdatter, also of Kirke Flinterup. Her uncle, Svend Jørgensen, (married to Birte Olsdatter) appears in a probate record in 1856 (for Birte/Beatte) and it lists Ane's father, Jens Jørgensen, as a guarantor in that record, being from Saltofte, which is part of the Stenmagle area of Sorø, Ane's area of birth. A number of people in the family area shown as being from Saltofte. Ole Rasmussen appears in a 1813 probate record (his), also in Egerup. Also listed in that record is Peder Larsen of Flinterup as his half-brother. Eggerup is within the Bringstrup parish in Ringsted, Sorø, Denmark. He appears in those records, listed as 57 at death in 1813, putting his birth at about 1756. Ane also appears in a record showing Ole Rasmussen in the probate record for a Rasmus Olsen of Kirke Flinterup, dated 19 Nov/19 Dec 1766, with Ole as ten years old, matching the one we have seen. In that record, the wife's father (Ane) is listed as Jens Jørgensen of Saltofte, matching the other Saltofte points. Based on this, I researched the Kirke Flinterup records and put together this family with her as a wife to Rasmus Olsen and Lars Pedersen. Two problems are confronted based on missing records: Stenmagle/Stenlille before 1790 and probate records between 1770 and 1790. Ane does not appear in a marriage record in Flinterup in 1755/1756 when she must have married Rasmus Olsen, so she was probably married in Stenmagle or Stenlille. Ane also does not appear in the death records nor probate records around 1775-1779 in Flinterup, so we don't know her age at death. Her children appear to have been born between 1756 and 1775, so she was probably born about 1735."
That long-winded description kind of shows the direction I headed.
In the process, also mentioned in the probate record, I started looking into the family of Sidse Larsdatter and Ole Sørensen. Sidse is listed as the daughter of Ane Jensdatter, subject of the above verbose tome.
A number of children were listed in the system for Sidse and Ole. Several were sons with no further information. With that, I turned to the somewhat laborious process of tracing these sons through the military levying rolls (MLR). This process opened a lot of possibilities.
The focus of this little story (above was prelude only), is on Ole Larsen. The run of his ancestry is thus:
Ole Sørensen 1763-1803 (husband of Sidse Larsdatter, both mentioned above)
Lars Olsen 1795-1855
Ole Larsen 1824-1903 (don't you just love patronymics?)
The MLR helped me trace Lars Olsen to the end of the records and helped me get him connected to his wife and children. I then tracked the son of Lars Olsen, Ole through the MLR tracing him eventually to Copenhagen. Up to this point all of the families had lived in rural Sorø or Holbæk counties. It is not unusual for children to seek their fortunes in the big city, as seems to be the case for Ole Larsen.
After searching and trying census records and hints in Ancestry ™, I stumbled across Ole Larsen and was pretty sure I had the correct one. He was in Copenhagen and the census records said that he was born in Munke Bjergby in one case and in Døiringe in another and the age was correct. (Døringe was a small community within Munke Bjergby.) Ole's military records all state that he was born in Døiringe.
According to MLR, he moved to Copenhagen from Holbæk and Sorø in 1855, after having bounced back and forth between communities in those other counties for several years. He appears in Copenhagen first in the 1860 census. Through some Ancestry™ searches, I found his marriage.
The 1860 and 1870 census records both listed his wife's last name as Larsen, which threw me off a bit. It usually isn't until the later years that they put the wife's married name (husband's last name) in the record, but apparently they did that here. In this and children records I determined later that her name was Kirstine Nielsen.
I started then searching for details about Kirstine. The census records were pretty consistent in saying that she was born in the county of Roskilde, not far from Copenhagen. I ended up finding a full birth date for her in the 1901 census (she listed as a widow). With that date (with the chance that the date is incorrect, which sometimes happens in census records), I ended up searching and finding her birth and christening in the city of Roskilde in the main parish church of that city.
Often I stop at that point, but I felt that I needed to really establish that she was not already in the FamilySearch system, so I would not be doing duplicate work.
Bingo. I found her with her parents in the 1840 census in Roskilde. With a little searching, I found a match for her in her family, as a child — and indeed, her individual work was completed.
The surprise was this:
Ole Larsen is my third cousin, four times removed, on my Sørensen Danish line.
Kirstine Nielsen is my First cousin, three times removed, on my Jacobson Danish line!
I do not often see my lines cross like this (basically never).
Kirstine's mother was the aunt (father's sister) for Ole Hansen Jacobson, my great-grandfather, who joined the church in Denmark with his mother and sister in the 1860s.
Up to this point, nothing was known about Kirstine, other than her existence. Now we have her with husband and children. Now I can work to get her descendants' work done.
End of message. You can stop reading now.
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A technical glitch I encountered was some snafu that is happening in FamilySearch. It seems that the system is becoming more insistent that work be done only for relatives, so connections are such that relationship is checked BEFORE you even get a chance to see whether temple work is available for someone.
I added the wife and children to Ole Larsen one day, and the next connected the wife to her family, that made her even more closely related to me. Then, suddenly, all of those children I added appeared as not being related to me at all. I found, by trial and error, that I could disconnect the child from the family, by using the edit-relationship icon, then I added the child back in by "Add Child." Then suddenly the child became related. That worked until I noticed that one of the sons had a wife, already connected by me that first day, was also now showing as not related, even after making sure her husband had been reconnected to his family to make him related. It turned out that someone from FamilySearch had to specifically make it work that she showed up as related. Oh well, I hope that they get that problem fixed soon.
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