Orphans for the Carnival of Genealogy # 85

I guess I could call myself an Orphan, as I have no descendants, but I think I have left a few marks to remember me. Monday November 30th I will for the fifth time be recorded in court records as a prospective juror (I have been on four juries already, I think I have impartial juror tatooed on my forehead), but I really want to tell about my great uncle Laurits Hansen.
In 1990 we had a Hansen reunion and we had descendants of 3 of the 5 Hansen brothers that came to the USA to Austin, Minnesota. They were descendants of Anton (my grandfather), John and Lawrence Hansen. See the article I did on that reunion here. Lorraine Erickson a daughter of Lawrence was a volunteer at a Family History Center and sent us group sheets on the five brothers and some addresses so we had a good reunion and found out a lot on the Hansen's we did not know before, but we wanted to learn more. In 1993 I signed up for the Christmas Tour of the Family History Library with Leland Meitzler and Donna Phillips and several other professional genealogists from Salt Lake City. I wanted to find Danish records and one of the professionals (Wade Hone) was a Scandinavian expert. He helped me find about 6 generations of records for my family in Denmark and one of the people I found was Laurits Hansen a twin brother of John Hansen. John and Laurits were twins and four days after birth they were christened in their home, which Wade said was rather odd. I later found out there was a flood in Denmark and they took the mother Karen Jorgensen and the two babies John and Laurits out the second story window in a row boat just after birth and neither John nor Laurits were expected to live, so that is why the priest came to thier home to christen them. John of course did live, but his twin Laurits died at 5 days old. Now I was wondering what happened? Remember we had descendants of Lawrence Hansen (Laurits in Denmark) at our reunion and Lawrence had 11 children so there are a lot of descendants, and the Danish records says he died at 5 days? John's family was wondering who was the twin in his ancestors as they had a bunch of twins in the grand kids of John. So this confirmed John was a twin. Wade suggested for me to keep looking in the records and sure enough after Martin Hansen was born that microfilm ended, so I went and got the next one and found two more boys born to Hans Mikkelsen and Karen Jorgensen, the first was Laurits Theodore and the second was Claudius. Although Laurits was a common name in the Danish records, I never found another Theodore anywhere. This was the Lawrence that came to the USA and had 11 kids! Claudius kind of intrigued me also as my dad was Claude Hansen, maybe named for his uncle?

To submit your own entry into the Carnival of Genealogy #85 on Orphans.