1) Why did it get started?

2) And why did I decide to try and make a web site?

Last question first: Everybody is asking me, "why don't you write a book about all you know about the Rantzau's? Answer: I know how to write, I know I would have to write a lot, and I am lazy!

On the other hand, I didn't know how to make a web site, it might be interesting to learn.

I could start relatively small and provide some information on the Rantzau family, and what I know about them. Later on I could always add, if I felt like it.

If anybody has questions about its subject, you are welcome. When it is not too much work, I might answer them! (In the meantime I received some interesting questions, and was able to provide assistance about a Rantzau diplomat in Rumania who ended up in a Russian prison, like, and probably in company with, Raoul Wallenberg.)

The answer to the first question is a longer story:

It started just after WW 2.

At my college we could get addresses for pen-pals, I got Omer Larson in Minnesota, Muriel James in the UK and Bente Olesen in Tarm, Denmark. 

Longing to see something of the world, I visited my Danish pen pal in 1948. After a week with her, I started to hitchhike around the country. Right at the start, (a rainy one), I was taken up and got a place in the back of the car, between two rather plump girls, twins. Along the way I got treated to coffee and we exchanged addresses. After a couple of X-mas cards, I was on a vacation/working tour in Finland (Had started studying naval architecture in between). Going there I passed Copenhagen. That's where the twin that had been taking care of the Christmas cards was working at that time. Well, we got married in 1958.

In 1992, after she and all my closest in-law's had died, and I had been busy with my Dutch forefathers since being pensioned off in 1988, I started on the Danes. There had been this family gossip, always intriguing, about one of the forefathers being the out-of-wedlock son of a count Rantzau. This might provide an interesting story for my daughter, and her future descendants.This relation to my daughter got me started and my love for detective work and doing things I do not know anything about led to a hobby which ran completely amok.

In the archives at Odense I dug out the details of what, officially, was known about the result of that love? affair. He was born in 1832, and there were a few blazing oddities in the parish records:

* The baby was not branded illegitimate, though his mother was not married at the time.

* Peder Hansen was named as being the father at baptism, so not away on a journey or soldiering. Why didn't he marry the girl before? He did so a few months later!

* The child got something extra at baptism; an addition to his name, viz. "Ørsted", the name of his birth-parish.

* When they finally got married, his mother was referred to as a "maiden", which was definitely not true.

Later children were just called Pedersen, not Pedersen Ørsted.

My conclusion was that the real father had been:

* waiting to see that the child was not born dead, in which case he would go scotfree,

* dealing with the man who was to marry the girl, for a price,

* talking to the priest, to go easy on the formalities.

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