Cathie Wells inspirered us to start searching for Christian Andersen’s roots. Cathie was visiting and we decided to do some detective work. We (Cathie and Finn) went to “Statens Arkiver” which is the Danish National Archives. Everything is available for the public. We spent 2.5 hours there and did not find anything. Our only lead was the birthday of Christian Andersen, June 18, 1885 on the island of Bornholm, but it did not get us anywhere. We did not know the city he was born in, and there are 14 parishes on Bornholm and we did not know where to start so we looked through all of them but with no luck.
After Cathie left, our friendly neighbour Jens came by and told us that we did not have to go to the “Statens Arkiver” to find information about ancestors. Everything up until 1892 is online. So we tried to do our research here. We tried a link that he gave us and wouldn’t you know it WE WERE IN LUCK.

The webpage (www.arkivalieronline.dk) contains names and censuses from the old Danish church books but you don’t have to get very far back before it gets almost impossible to read.

We have decided only to look for Christian’s ancestors because the family already has a lot of information about his wife Marie. We have also only decided to follow one track so far because there is so much information that it can be hard to grasp.
We found out a lot of things. We found out that Christian is actually spelled Kristian in his birth notice in a church book. We found Christian’s name on a ship’s manifest from Ellis Island records. (We don’t know when or why he switched the spelling of his name from Kristian to Christian.) We found out how the name Andersen came into the family and also when.
Did you know that Kristian’s father was a farmer and his grandfather (Christian Peter Andersen) was selling clocks and his fathers godfathers were clock builders? Bornholm is/was very famous for a clock called “Bornholmer ur” (Bornholm clock) also known in the US as a grandfather clock.

Click here to read about the famous Bornholm glass.

Two other great things from Bornholm is glass and smoked herring. When I (Finn) was in middle school we had a trip to Bornholm and I bought 12 smoked herring and had them shipped home. When my mother received the packed she thought that somebody made a joke with her, who on earth would send 12 smelly fish wrapped in paper (other than her son). She finally opened the package and enjoyed the smoked herring with the rest of the family. It turned out to be a very successful shipment.

Click here to read about the famous smoked herring.

Making this website has taken us from Bornholm to Ellis Island in NY, and it has been a great trip. We have been to the old steam ship OSCAR II (the one that took Marie and Kristian to the US). We were travelling third class and would really have liked to have been bumped up to first ;-).
You will not believe how much information there is on the Internet and when you have first started it seems not to have an end. Be sure to check back occasionally — there is probably more to come.