Finding information about our ancestors can often be a difficult experience, but one of my most frustrating searches has been trying to discover the history of my 2nd great-grandfather, Peter Christian Christensen, who was orphaned at the age of three while immigrating to America. Various family members in the past have paid professional genealogists to research his history, but these professionals have mostly presented us with “facts” with no documentation or explanation as to how these facts were determined. Many of these facts do not agree with the documentation that is much easier to come by in these days when research can be done over the Internet with its plethora of scanned original documents.
[Photos and documents included here are taken from ancestry.com unless otherwise noted.]
The Family History as Handed Down
Most family histories agree that Peter Christian Christensen was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in either 1849 or 1850. The most common consensus is that he was born on December 5, 1849, which is the birth date that appears on his death certificate.
The family histories all agree that his father’s name was Christian Christensen, but the name of his mother is the source of some disagreement. Some say her name was Caroline or Karen Nielson; others say her name was Magrethe Hansdatter. The documentation that is available today seems to indicate that she was Magrethe Hansdatter, although his death certificate gives his mother’s name as Caroline.
The death certificate for Peter Christian Christensen, from the Utah Death Certificate Index, at http://archives.utah.gov/research/indexes/20842.htm
John Erik Forsgren
All the family histories also say that after the death of his parents on their way to their new home in America, which happened in 1853 when he was three years old, he was taken in by John Erik Forsgren—the Mormon missionary and leader of their group of immigrants—and raised for a time by the Forsgren family. I tend to question this fact, because my research shows me that Forsgren was a man who often neglected his own families and didn’t seem to be the type of person who would volunteer to take in someone else’s child.
Little is known of Peter’s life between his becoming orphaned in 1853 and his marriage in 1872. There are a few anecdotal tales concerning him, and some family histories state that at some point in his childhood he left the Forsgren family and went to live with the Lowry family, which could be either the family of John Lowry Sr. or the family of one of his sons, John Jowry Jr. or Abner Lowry.
left to right: John Lowry Sr., John Lowry Jr., and Abner Lowry
His life after his marriage is not as much of a mystery. He and his wife, Mary Mallinson, were active members of the community, raised a large family, and left a legacy of hundreds of descendants. Since Peter lived in a time when many of his contemporaries were defying federal law in order to practice the questionable “doctrine of plural marriage” that caused so much bitterness and dissention in so many families, it gives me pleasure to know that he had the sensitivity to remain in one commited monogamous relationship, dedicating himself to one and only one loving family.
A portrait of the Christensen family, ca. 1888: Blanche Ophelia, Mary Mallinson, Edward, Peter Angelo, Peter Christian, Nelson Howard, Ernest Raymond, and Hannah Caroline (Daisy) Christensen. [image from the web site of Randall L. Christensen, http://www.randallchristensen.info/]
Birth, Ocean Voyage, and Loss of Family
Birth
Peter Christian Christiansen was born Hans Peter Christensen to Christian Christensen and Magrethe Hansdatter Christensen in 1849 or early 1850, in Copenhagen, Denmark. I have copied the following information from the 1850 Danish census:
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København, København (Staden), Amagerbro Kvarter, Christianshavn III – Amagerbro, , Store Torve[gade 386, baghuset, 1 ste sal, 1013, FT-1850
Name: Christian Christensen; Age: 32; Marital status: Gift; Occupation: arbeidsmand, huusfader; Birth place: Kirkesaabye Sogn, Roeskilde Amt
Name: Margrethe Hansdatter; Age: 24; Marital status: Gift; Occupation: hans kone; Birth place: Skulleløv Sogn, Frederiksborg Amt
Name: Hans Peter Christensen; Age: 1; Marital status: Ugift; Occupation: deres barn; Birth place: Kbhvn
[found on the Dansk Demografisk Database, http://ddd.dda.dk/kiplink_en.htm]
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This gives not only Peter’s approximate birth year and place of birth, but also that of his mother and father. I have not yet been able to find any more documentation of his mother’s early history, but I have been able to find his father in the 1834 Danish census, along with his parents, Christen Christensen and Karen Jacobsdatter Christensen, and his three brothers, Niels, Jens, and Hans. I have also been able to locate a copy of Christian Christensen’s birth record. [These were also found on the Dansk Demografisk Database, http://ddd.dda.dk/kiplink_en.htm]
This birth record for Christian Christensen, although difficult to decipher, shows him being born on April 9, 1819.
Among the few things a three-year-old orphan would be able to remember, I believe his birthday would be one of them, so I have accepted the birth date that Peter celebrated throughout his life, December 5, 1849, to probably be correct.
Ocean Voyage
Erastus Snow
When John Erik Forsgren, known as “the Swedish Missionary,” and his partner, Erastus Snow, were deported from Sweden, they moved on to Denmark, where the Christensen family became some of the earliest Danish converts to Mormonism. When Christian and Magrethe Christensen had a second son, they named him Jon Erastus Christensen in honor of the two missionaries. Soon after that, they began preparing to leave their home to journey to America and join the other Mormons in Utah.
In 1852, along with a large company of other Mormons who had been forced to sell their homes and properties at less than half their value, they sailed on the steamship Obetrit to Kiel, Germany. From there, they traveled by train to Hamburg, Germany, where they boarded the ship Lion, which took them to Hull, England. They again traveled by train to get to Liverpool, England, where they boarded the ship Forest Monarch. They stayed on the ship anchored on the River Mersey for several weeks when bad weather kept them from departing. On January 16, 1853, they finally set sail for America.
The group was not well prepared for their journey. The Forest Monarch was a “Packet Ship,” not originally intended for carrying passengers, and has sometimes been referred to as the “Mayflower of the Mormon Migration from Scandinavia.” Cramped quarters, filthy living conditions, and putrid food left many of the group deathly ill. Although Peter seemed to have made the journey without any problems, the rest of his family arrived in America suffering from dysentery and dehydration.
Loss of Family
The death of Peter Christian Christensen’s mother (and four other people) as they arrived at the mouth of the Mississippi River is recorded simply in the journal of Christian Nielsen Munk:
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Monday, March 7. We had our first glimpse of the American continent early in the morning, but in the afternoon at 4 o’clock, anchor was cast in the roads. On the same day we lost an aged sister from the island of Fyen, Denmark. She was buried on a small island a short distance from the main land.
Friday, March 8. Hans Petersen lost a year old baby girl, who was buried on the same island.
Saturday, March 12. In the evening, the wife of Christian Christiansen of Copenhagen, died.
Sunday, March 13. Anders Ipsen, a much beloved brother died; he was a first elder who labored as L.D.S. Missionary on the island of Bornholm. He also was buried on the little island.
Monday, March 14. Christian Jensen lost a little boy who was buried at sea. Brother Christiansen from Copenhagen lost his wife who was buried on the little island previously mentioned. On this day anchor was weighed about noon and we were hauled in by two steamboats, but the water was so shallow at the mouth of the Mississippi that the keel of our vessel scraped the ground. We dropped anchor in the evening.
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I don’t know if anyone today knows where the island is located where she was buried, and perhaps her remains will be lost forever. Curiously, Munk mentions her death on both March 12 and March 14. The mention of her death in the journal of Christian Nielsen verifies that she died on March 12:
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March 12. In the morning at 5 o’clock, Christensen’s wife died.
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Nielsen’s journal entry says that she died in the morning, while Munk’s jounral entry says that she died in the evening, but they are obviously talking about the same person.
Her death is also recorded in the Manuscript History of the John H. Forsgren Emigrating Company:
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Saturday, Mar. 12. The wife of Brother C. Christensen died.
[Why this record is called the “Manuscript History of the John H. Forsgren Emigrating Company” when the leader was John E. Forsgren is a mystery to me.]
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The passenger list of the Forest Monarch as it arrived in New Orleans, Louisiana, lists Magrethe Christensen with the notation “died.” She is listed with C. Christensen and a Christine Christensen whom I have not yet been able to identify. Young Peter is listed as “Hansfrider.” I am assuming that the language barrier between the U.S. workers and the Danish immigrants caused the worker to record the name incorrectly. There does not seem to be a mention of the infant Jon Erastus Christensen on this record, so he must have accidentally slipped by unnoticed. All of the passengers on this page are listed as being from Germany, although they are all from Denmark. I must assume this is also a clerical error.
The Christensen family appears on the passenger list disembarking from the Forest Monarch upon its arrival in New Orleans.
The passengers then boarded the steamship Grand Tower, on which they continued their journey north on the Mississippi River to Saint Louis, Missouri.
The death of Peter’s brother, Jon Erastus, is recorded in the journal of Christian Nielsen:
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April 3rd. Sunday. During the night there had been a fire in the city that we could see from our beds. A very old woman died. Three pairs of people were married, Sobesyder Christensen’s youngest child had died. [Sobesyder, Danish for soap maker, probably refers to Christian Christensen’s profession in Denmark.]
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His death is also recorded in the Manuscript History of the John H. Forsgren Emigrating Company:
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Saturday, Apr. 2. In the evening Brother C. Christensen’s son died.
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His death is shown in the Missouri State Registry of Deaths for the week ending April 3, 1853: European, died of dysentery, buried in Wesleyan Cemetery.
Jon Erastus Christensen in the Missouri State Registry of Deaths. [scanned from a copy provided by the State of Missouri.]
The death of Christian Christensen is recorded in the Manuscript History of the John H. Forsgren Emigrating Company:
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Sunday, Apr. 3. Brother C. Christensen died in the afternoon; in the forenoon Sister Dinnesen passed away.
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His death is shown in the Missouri State Registry of Deaths for the week ending April 10, 1853: Danish, died of dysentery, buried in a pauper’s grave in City Cemetery.
Christian Christensen in the Missouri State Registry of Deaths. [scanned from a copy provided by the State of Missouri.]
The following information was found on findagrave.com, attributed to the Saint Louis Genealogical Society:
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There used to be 3 City Cemeteries which are all now gone/moved. Most burials ended up in “New Pickers” Cemetery which is part of Gatewood Cemetery. There are no markers for the City Cemeteries burials.
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So the remains of Christian Christensen are also lost forever.
The Unknown Years
From 1853 until the time of his marriage, little is known of Peter Christian Christensen.
The John Forsgren Family
All of the family histories state that John Forsgren took in the orphaned Peter and that Peter was raised by the Forsgren family. John Forsgren does not appear to have been a responsible family man, and it seems doubtful to me that he would have voluntarily taken responsibility for someone else’s child. Among his many marriages are a large number of divorces. Six months after his first marriage—when his wife, Mary Ann Hunt, may have possibly been pregnant—he joined the Mormon Battalion to fight in the Mexican War, leaving her to make the difficult trip to Utah without him. Their son died as an infant, and after he finally arrived in Utah she divorced him.
Early in the second year of his second marriage, Forsgren left his wife, Sarah Bell Davis, and their infant child, when he volunteered to go on a four-year mission to his native Sweden—which became a mission to Denmark when he was kicked out of Sweden. After he returned from Denmark, and shortly after the birth of their second child, he took another wife in plural marriage. Sarah became upset over this and moved out of his house, and divorced him four years later, two years after the birth of their third child. Through his many marriages, these three were the only children of his who survived.
In John’s later years, Forsgren proclaimed himself a prophet and began preaching his own religion on the street under the name of “J.J. Branch,” but people referred to him as “the Bench Prophet.” When times became tough, he and his fifth wife, Kiersten Nelson Johnson, lived in a large tent. One night, when their lantern ignited the tent, he rushed in to save his journals, ignoring his wife, who had to be rescued by a woman from the neighborhood and was severly disfigured for the rest of her life.
An article about John E. Forsgren (J.J. Branch) in the Salt Lake Daily Herald, July 9, 1881, page 8.
Although the descendants of John Forsgren have done extensive research into his life, documenting it thoroughly, I cannot find any mention of young Peter in any of their histories. The closest I can come to any vague evidence of Peter is in the 1860 census, where there is a ten-year-old Peter listed in the household of Forsgren’s fourth wife, Ingeborg Petersen. This could quite possibly be him, but whether he actually lived with her would be questionable. She had just recently arrived in Utah the previous year, and this census also lists Forsgren’s three children, who were not living there either. Sarah Bell Davis had remarried, and the census shows these children living with her and her new husband. It has been said that the Mormon settlers often declared children in multiple households in the census in order to pad the population to help Utah qualify for statehood.
The 1860 census showing a ten-year-old Peter living in the Ingeborg Forsgren household.
Then again, there is a possibility that the Peter in this census might be a son of Ingeborg from her first marriage. Not much is known about her early life other than that she was widowed before she came to America. It should also be noted that Ingeborg was granted a divorce from John in 1862 on the grounds that she was neglected any support by her husband.
The Lowry Family
Some family histories also say that Peter left the Forsgrens at some point in his childhood and went to live the Lowry family. I am still searching to find some documented evidence of his living with the Lowries.
His Mother’s Name
There is also a story in one family history explaining why he thought his mother‘s name was Caroline. It is said that when he was preparing to be married he was curious about his background. He found an old Bible among his family’s belongings that contained the names Christian Christensen and Caroline Christensen. He assumed these were his parent‘s names, which is why that name Caroline is on his death certificate as his mother‘s name.
The Search Continues
I am still searching for more information about Peter’s family and his early life in Utah. I continue to look through Danish records on the Internet, hoping to find some documentation about his parents and their families, but it is a long and tedious process.
One more search that I am hoping will pan out concerns an article in the Ogden Standard Examiner from 1935. It describes the Rebildbacker Park Museum in Denmark, dedicated to the early Mormons who emigrated from Denmark. This article speaks of memoirs from four Danish pioneers that were to be placed in the museum. Among these four pioneers is P.C. Christensen, which is the name Peter went by in his later years. Peter was already dead by 1935, so this memoir would probably have been submitted by one of children. I have tried contacting some people who are affiliated with this park, trying to find out if these memoirs or transcripts of them still exist, but as yet have received no responses. I am still hoping to be able to find this document.
An article from The Ogden Standard-Examiner, Tuesday Evening, March 19, 1935
I hope to be able to add to this story some time in the future, after I have found more information about Peter Christian Christensen.
Eric’s Roots 