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Kurt Johnson
The look on my mother’s face was priceless.
Gathering last week at St. John’s Church in Kronborg for a family reunion of the Niels and Anna Marie Andersen clan was a walk back in time for everyone who attended, and a precious opportunity to connect the dots for my 87-year-old mother, Elna. Mom was the only grandchild represented from her generation of the Andersen family tree, and it meant the world to her that so many ventured to Kronborg to meet extended family members, many for the first time, and to better understand how deeply their roots are planted here in Hamilton County.
For the record, my great-grandfather, Niels Andersen, was born in Denmark in 1850 and boarded a ship some 22 years later bound for the United States. He settled in Chicago and later moved to Wisconsin, where he met his wife, Anna Marie Hansen. The following year the newlyweds purchased 80 acres of raw prairie land in Hamilton County and came to establish their home on the pioneer farm in Otis township. A family history reports that they brought with them no household effects and had only $100 to their name.
Like so many of the Midwestern pioneers, the young Andersens endured hardships in those early days, losing their crop entirely in a hail storm during their second year. They persisted, however, raising crops and cattle on 80 acres, later doubling the size of their spread. They raised 10 children in rural Hamilton County, including Hans Christian, Herman, Johanna, Tunis, Hans, Marius, Metto, Otto, Caroline and the youngest of the clan, my grandmother Agnes. The family remained on the farm until Niels retired in 1916 and moved to a small house near the church in Kronborg.
Grandma eventually met another young Dane, Severt Christensen from Colorado, likely through a church connection, and spent the rest of her life mostly on the Colorado plains near Brush. All of my memories of Grandma and Grandpa Christensen are of their later years in Brush, so connecting the dots back here in Hamilton County feels like life coming full circle for me.
I’ve attended church services several times at St. John’s during my time in Aurora and always enjoy the annual aebleskiver feed in February. I tried my hand for the first time this weekend at turning that sphere-shaped Danish dish and have to admit that my ancestry did not enhance my cooking skills. Guess it’s time to up my game and pass on some of those family recipes to the next generation, keeping the stories and traditions alive.
That, I realized, is why my dear mother had a smile on her face all weekend long. Mom often talked about memories of visiting the Kronborg area where her own mother grew up as a child, and it’s important to her that future generations hear those stories and keep the memories alive. Knowing how I’m related to some of my distant relatives in the area is confusing, to be honest, so to see it all drawn out on a detailed family tree, complete with birth years, spouses and children from each branch helped give me a clearer sense of where I fit in this world, at least on the Andersen tree.
It takes time and effort to document those records, and even more commitment to stay connected with those outer branches of a family tree. My mother and late father Loral made that a priority throughout their lives, for which I will always be grateful.
After enjoying our three-day reunion May 19-21, some of us returned for church services the following Sunday morning. I couldn’t help but picture my grandparents in my mind’s eye, walking down that aisle back on Nov. 24, 1920 in a church that probably looked very much the same as it does today. My wife and I were married on that same date 69 years later not far down the road in York and displayed the same wedding ornament on our cake, connecting the dots yet again.
My grandfather was a Colorado cattleman who bought thousands of head over his lifetime, but he always said the best purchase he ever made was here in Nebraska -- a wedding license purchased at the Hamilton County courthouse.
No wonder this place has always felt like home.
KURT JOHNSON can be reached at kjohnson@ hamilton.net
