Randy Seaver has posted this week’s Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge and it’s a great topic:

Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission Impossible music, please!):

1)   Which of your ancestors had an unusual occupation?

2)  Tell us about it in a blog post of your own, in a comment on this blog, or in a Facebook post.

I actually had to think about this for a few minutes because I had two possibilities who were actually father and son. I decided to go with the son and he is my 2X great grandfather, Frits Wille Oscar Emil Jensen, who left Copenhagen, Denmark in 1884 and settled with his family in Calais, Washington, Maine.

According to my grandmother, her maternal grandfather didn’t work after he came to Calais, much to her father’s chagrin, and I chuckled when I found him in the 1900 U.S. census listed as a detective. I wasn’t quite sure what he would be “detecting” in Calais.

However, after finding the Jensen family in the Danish census records, I realized that “detective” was his title. He worked as a policeman at the prison outside Copenhagen in Herstedvester!

From that description, I am not sure if he was a prison guard or a policeman stationed at the prison. I think it was probably the latter.

For the 1870s, Frits had what I would consider to be a somewhat modern, unusual occupation.

Thank you, Randy, for this week’s challenge. I liked it – it was different. 🙂