En pudsig historie om en gravsten fra Dannebrog, Nebraska

[Lissa Pedersen]

Fra en mail fra GeneaNet har jeg dette:

Baby's tombstone found 1,000 miles away 130 years later

By Amy Schweitzer
amy.schweitzer@theindependent.com
Published: Monday, October 31, 2011 9:26 PM CDT

DANNEBROG -- Clara Nielsen was less than 2 months old when she died. Now her tombstone has finally found its way to her gravesite about 130 years after her death.

The stone was found at a garage sale more than a 1,000 miles away from its owner's resting place in Dannebrog.

When Gene Ellison of Knoxville, Tenn., went to a yard sale earlier this year and saw the white stone with a large chip broken off the top, the amateur genealogist decided he wanted to find its owner.

All he had to go on was the engraving on the stone: "Clara dau. of N & M Nielsen, Died May 20, 1881, 1 mo. 26 da."

Ellison took the stone home for a couple dollars and started searching the Internet for information. He found the names Niels and Maria Nielsen in the Nysted Cemetery, said Marilyn Nelson of Dannebrog, who Ellison contacted in search of more information on the Nysted Cemetery and the Nielsens.

"It dawned on me that the church hadn't even been organized yet, nor the cemetery platted yet (by 1881)," Nelson said, adding that she has done quite a bit of genealogy help for others over the years but never for someone who had found a tombstone and was trying to find its owner.

Niels and Bodil Maria Nielsen were married in Grand Island in 1872 after arriving here from Denmark. They started married life in a sod house in the Nysted area. They had a couple of children who died, but none of the dates or ages matched the tombstone information.

Nelson found Bodil Maria Nielsen's obituary that linked the couple to people she knew as dependents of the Nielsen family who still live in the Dannebrog area, but they didn't know about baby Clara.

Then Ellison, still working through Internet genealogy sites, found another Niels Nielsen, this one buried in Dannebrog's Oakridge Cemetery, just four miles away from the Nysted Cemetery. The site listed a baby Clara also buried in the same lot.

Nelson was able to check the actual cemetery records at the Dannebrog Village Office and "sure enough, it reads exactly what's on the tombstone," she said.

She also checked the cemetery itself and found no marker on the grave. It turned out that this Niels Nielsen was the other Niels Nielsen's father and grandfather to baby Clara.

Nelson said she has read the old tombstones in many areas of Howard County to submit to genealogy sites and was embarrassed when she realized that she was the one who had submitted the reading and hadn't even thought about checking the Dannebrog Cemetery until Ellison found it.

"I thought, 'Here I am five miles from Dannebrog and the man in Tennessee is the one finding it,'" she said with a laugh.

"I said, 'Well, the tombstone is in Tennessee and the grave is here. Now what do we do?'"

Ellison agreed to ship the headstone to Dannebrog, where it was placed at the grave two weeks ago by Clara's niece, Joyce Lemburg, and great-nephews, Jim and Ralph Mingus, as well as Ralph's wife, Judy, and Dannebrog City Manager Terry Webb.

But the question remains as to how baby Clara's tombstone ended up in Tennessee.

The woman who sold the stone to Ellison said they found it in a shed when they moved into a house in Omaha in the late 1980s and when they moved to Tennessee, they took it with them. Other than using it occasionally as a Halloween decoration, she didn't know much about it.

Nelson said her best guess is that a relative in eastern Nebraska had the tombstone made for Clara shortly after her death, but for some reason it never made the trip to Dannebrog.

Nelson said it is amazing that Ellison was able to find the right Nielsens as quickly as he did. Not only are there nearly limitless possibilities for N. and M. Nielsen, but also even to find the right Niels Nielsen is a long shot.

"There seems to be one in every generation in nearly every (Nielsen) family," she said, adding that there surely was a Niels Nielsen in nearly every Danish settlement around that time.

She said she tried to recreate the way Ellison found the Nysted connection through Google and genealogy websites and "came up with a lot of different name combinations and never did come up with the right one."

Linket til siden er her, hvor der også er et billede af gravstenen: http://www.theindependent.com/articles/2011/10/31/news/local/14100510.txt

Hilsen Lissa

[Bente Wanning]

 
hej forum
Virkelig spændende historie.

[Hanne Fachmann]

Tak fordi du delte denne spændende og flotte historie med os.
mvh Hanne VF

[Trine Nielsen]

Sikke dog en god historie!

[Lissa Pedersen]

Ja, jeg syntes, at andre også skulle læse med. Måske er der forskere, som har aner i området. Jeg kan også anbefale at læse om Dannebrog på dette link: http://www.dannebrognebraska.org/index.php

Desværre er artiklen kun på engelsk, men for ikke-engelsk kyndige anbefales at bruge: www.translate.google.com. Oversæt eventuelt i mindre "bidder".

Jeg købte sidste år et par bøger om Dannebrog og de første danske bosættere der. Titlerne er: "Dannebrog på den amerikanske prærie" og "Peter S. Petersens Erindringer - en kilde til den danske bosættelse i Dannebrog, Nebraska 1871-1895". Begge er udgivet af Odense Bys Museer. Rigtig gode bøger, som jeg varmt kan anbefale, hvis man vil læse om en dansk bosættelse, eller hvis man eventuelt har familie, som udvandrede dertil.

Mvh Lissa