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Family history
My name (including its weird spelling) has been in my family for generations. My father is Walter Steuard Jensen, Jr., son of Walter Steuard Jensen, son of Walter ??? Jensen, son of Steuard Raun Jensen who came to America from Denmark as a teenager. The source of that name has always been a bit of a puzzle, but we've had no way of tracing it further back because the family lost track of its Danish relatives (even their names) years ago. That's always left me a little sad: I've enjoyed connecting with my mother's distant cousins in Sweden, and it would be nice to have something like that on my father's side.
Flash forward to my mother's visit last week. In cleaning out old boxes, she found a letter from one Niels Jensen to his brother in America. The letter talked about all of the surviving siblings back in Denmark (including full names), and a bit of Google searching eventually led me to a definitive match: the family of Rasmus August Jensen (translated here from Danish).
If you look at that list of children, you'll see that there's a distinct lack of Steuards there (by any spelling). But there is a "Søren Ravn Jensen", and a comment in the letter seems to confirm that that was my great-great-grandfather's given name. So apparently I ought to be named Søren! My new theory is that Søren decided at some point that he wanted a more American-sounding name, but when he chose one he wasn't clear on how to spell it. We'll see if this takes us anywhere in the future; it would be fun to see if we could track down any living cousins back in Denmark.
Flash forward to my mother's visit last week. In cleaning out old boxes, she found a letter from one Niels Jensen to his brother in America. The letter talked about all of the surviving siblings back in Denmark (including full names), and a bit of Google searching eventually led me to a definitive match: the family of Rasmus August Jensen (translated here from Danish).
If you look at that list of children, you'll see that there's a distinct lack of Steuards there (by any spelling). But there is a "Søren Ravn Jensen", and a comment in the letter seems to confirm that that was my great-great-grandfather's given name. So apparently I ought to be named Søren! My new theory is that Søren decided at some point that he wanted a more American-sounding name, but when he chose one he wasn't clear on how to spell it. We'll see if this takes us anywhere in the future; it would be fun to see if we could track down any living cousins back in Denmark.