Ancestors

Jens Aslaksen

Jens Aslaksen was born on 26 March 1835 in Holt, the country parish around Tvedestrand on the south coast of Norway, and baptized in Holt church on 5 April. His parents lived at Joranstad, a farm in the parish. The clerk wrote him Jens Olsen, son of Skipper Ole Aslachsen and Toroline Ellefsdatter. Olsen was his patronymic, the name every son of an Ole was given. As a man he used his father's patronymic, Aslaksen, as a fixed family name instead, and his children carried it after him.

His father died before 1865. That year Jens was thirty-one and unmarried, living in house 41 in Tvedestrand with his widowed mother. He was entered as a traelasthandler, a timber merchant. Three Christoffersen granddaughters of hers lived with them, the children of a married sister. The trade was the town's reason for existing. Tvedestrand had been made a ladested, a licensed loading port, in 1836, and a town on 1 January 1838. The charter let it ship timber and iron out of the harbour for Naes Jernverk, the ironworks in Holt parish that ran longer than any other in Norway.

On 4 November 1868 he married Petrea Halvordine Simonsen in Holmestrand church, on her twenty-second birthday. She was an office clerk's daughter of that town, on the west shore of the Oslofjord, and she was called Dina. The marriage entry names his father as Ole Aslaksen. Olaf was born at Tvedestrand ten months later. At the baptism Jens was a handelsborger, a burgher licensed to trade in the town. Niels Henrik followed in 1870 and Valborg Eugenie in 1872.

In 1870 the family shared the house at Hoved Gade 41 with his mother, who was seventy-three and dealt in spirits. Jens was a kjøbmand, a merchant. Two of his nieces lived with them, and so did Dina's brother Frederik Simonsen, a seaman of twenty-one. By the census of 1875 Jens headed the household himself, on the second floor of the same house. He took lodgers: a schoolteacher, a merchant's clerk, his brother-in-law Frederik, now a mate, and his niece Augusta Christophersen. Three maids kept the house. His mother had died that November.

Later the family moved north to Dina's country. By 1884 they were at Botne, the parish around Holmestrand. A son, David, was born on 17 May 1884, and Johannes followed in 1887, when Jens was entered as a house owner. In 1891 the whole family lived in one house in Langgaden, Holmestrand, with Dina's father, Nils Henrik Simonsen, a widower of seventy-eight. Dina's brother Jens Fredrik lived there too, with his wife Augusta and their four children. Augusta was Jens's own niece from Tvedestrand. Jens and Dina had David and Johannes with them, and a foster daughter, Eugenie Smith, born at Fredrikshald in 1877.

The merchant of Tvedestrand did not stay a merchant. In the census of 1900 Jens was sixty-five and living at Botne in a house of his own called Aslaksborg, on the land of Søndre Klev. He was entered as a sagarbeider og huseier, a sawmill worker and house owner. Dina was an arbeiderhustru, a working man's wife. David, sixteen, was apprenticed to a smith at the mechanical works.

In February 1905 Olaf, by then a ship's master, and David, twenty, left Kristiania for New York. Eight months later their parents followed. On 5 October 1905 Jens and Dina sailed from Kristiania on the Hellig Olav, bound for Ohio. The police protocol gives Jens as seventy, married, a property owner of Holmestrand. The purpose of the journey was written in three words: til sine Børn, to their children. They paid 336 kroner and 20 øre for the two tickets and carried 300 kroner with them.

They lived at Cleveland for five years and came home in 1910. The census of December 1910 finds Jens and Dina in Kristiania, at Schøningsgate 14, in the flat of their daughter Valborg and her husband Karl Bull, a clerk at Det Norske Veritas. Jens was seventy-five. He gave his occupation in America as none: "Underholdt av børn i Amerika", supported by children in America. His last American home was Cleveland, Ohio.

He died in Kristiania some time in the next ten years. Dina was a widow by the census of December 1920. His burial has not been found.

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Cite: Heirology, "Jens Aslaksen (b. 1835)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/jens-aslaksen-1835-888a59.