Across Oceans, Across Time ® . . . Stories from the Genealogy Center
By Michele McNabb, Manager & Librarian, Museum of Danish America Genealogy Center
Looking Backwards – Theodor Frederik Jensen Schnohr, born on December 5, 1888, was the son of an Odense green grocer. He immigrated to the US in 1906, settling first in New York, where he married a young Bohemian immigrant, Mary Novack, in 1911, and had two children, Charlotte and Edward, before moving to Cranston, Rhode Island, where he found work in an iron foundry and later, worked as a pasteurizer in the H. P. Hood dairy. His appearances in traditional genealogical sources indicate a typical uneventful life. He sponsored a younger brother’s immigration in 1918, registered for the “Old Men’s Draft” in 1942, and finally became a US citizen in 1944. He died in Warwick, Rhode Island in 1970.
Genealogical sources can take many different forms, however, and it turns out that the impetus for this young man’s departure from Denmark was not quite that of the usual immigrant. After taking his realeksamen, young Theodor apprenticed in his father’s grocery for several years before being sent over to a businessman in Vejle in order to gain more experience. Here, away from home, temptation beckoned, and like teenagers before and after him, Theodor made a few ill-advised decisions that finally ended with him being arrested for petty theft.
At the time photography was regularly used to register individuals the police wanted to keep track of, and hence the above portrait was taken by the Vejle police in 1906. Seventeen years of age and with an unblemished record, Theodor was given a suspended sentence, on the proviso that he kept out of trouble for five years. And he did, at least in Denmark, for his father sent him to America on a one-way ticket.
Young Theodor’s portrait and story, along with many others, is found in a fascinating book about the history of the use of photography by the Danish police, Forbrydelsens ansigt (The Face of Crime), published by Gads Forlag in 2013.
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