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I can find no reference in my notes to the surname Selen, but a search on Ancestry.com easily turns up the 1900 Census, which shows Peter and Freeda Selen, with their four children, farming rented land in Ross Township — probably southeast of Ainsworth, to judge by their landowning neighbors: Larson, Wojahn, and Yager can all be placed along 73rd Avenue between S.R. 51 and Randolph between the 1891 Plat Book and the 1908 Plat Map.
Annie, born in Illinois in 1888,[1] was about 10 years old during this school year. She had a brother, Albert, born 1891, who ought to have been in school with her; also a sister, Ester, born 1892; and then in June 1897 along came little Alexander.
Peter Selen had come to this country from Sweden in the mid-1880s. In 1888, he married Fredericka Dorette Ellene "Freeda" Wilkens, a German immigrant. They lived in Illinois through Ester's birth in 1892, at least. Why they came down to farm in Ross Township, I have no clue. The 1910 Census shows the family living in Chicago, Peter working as a carpenter — but they had lived in Indiana through about 1907, when their youngest child was born.
Per the Cook County, Illinois, Deaths Index, Annie Selen died, unmarried, on February 12, 1919.
[to be continued]
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[1] Her death record says September 17, 1888; the 1900 Census says September 1887; her parents' marriage (if I've found the right people) took place April 7, 1888.
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