Family Reunion: Thompson/Thomsen
A Quick Overview of my work under this surname
My wife’s paternal grandmother, June Margery Shuffler (1928-2010), was descended from several families of Scandinavian immigrants on her mother’s side. There are several challenges involved in trying to research these families and create accurate profiles on WikiTree. There are language issues, leading to inconsistency in the immigration records; there are cultural differences in the way Scandinavian surnames and middle names are used; and once you have followed an immigrant’s line back to their country of origin, there can be confusion about the geography - especially if they emigrated during a time of conflict when borders were changing.
All of that makes the work more interesting, but more time-consuming.
As of this writing, I have only managed to add profiles for Grandma June’s four grandparents to WikiTree. If you follow the link to her page (above, in the first paragraph) and click on the green “Show Ancestors” button, you will be able to see if I have added more people. Here is a preview of the research I have done on Ancestry, from my public tree:
June’s mother, Esther Anna (Thompson) Shuffler (1908 - 1988), was the youngest daughter of Thomas Christian Thomsen (1876–1951) and Lena D Jensen (1874–1952), born on 16 Jun 1908 in Council Bluffs, Pottawattamie, Iowa.
Thomas Christian (Thomsen) Thompson (1876 - 1951) was the son of Jens Laurits Thomsen (b. 1849) and Mette Marie Thomsdatter (b. 1849), born on 2 Oct 1876 in Gudum, a parish of Ålborg, Denmark.
You may have noticed that Thomas was given the surname “Thomsen” when he was born, instead of the traditional patronym of “Jensen” even though his father, Jens, seems to have been named “Jens Thomsen” after his father, Thomas Jensen. This Wikipedia article suggests that the 1856 naming act in Denmark could be the reason for this switch. Jens was born in 1849, so he took the traditional patronym. His son, born long after the naming act required children to inherit their father’s surname, then took “Thomsen” instead of “Jensen”.
That’s not confusing enough, though, because after emigrating to the United States, Thomas spelled his name as “Thompson” in the English fashion.
Tom’s wife, Lena Marie Dagmar (Jensen) Thompson (1874 - 1952) was born on 10 Sep 1874 in Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, so she was not affected by that same 1856 naming act. Her parents, Hans Jensen (1846–1909) and Anna Nielsen (1846–1935), however, were both born in Denmark, but I have a lot of work to do before I will be ready to say more about them.
Before creating a WikiTree profile for people of Scandinavian descent, you need to know their Last Name At Birth (LNAB) - which may require extra research. There are pretty good digitized records for Scandinavian ancestors, but teasing out which records are documenting the people you are looking for is complicated. If you’re working on a family like this one, take your time and be open to changing your mind about any assumptions you may have had about their story.
If you have questions about a family like this one in your own research, there are a lot of helpful researchers out there doing similar work. If you leave a comment, I can help you find resources on WikiTree’s message boards, or elsewhere.
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