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102 <strong>AEMI</strong> JOURNAL 2015<br />
Fig 4 The organ of St. Laurentius in Langenhorn,<br />
donated by Sönke Ingwersen to his village of birth.<br />
Source: D. Elger, Die Kunstdenkmäler des<br />
Landes Schleswig-Holstein, 1952<br />
Fig 3 Sönke Ingwersen (1715-1786) the «Baron<br />
of Gelting». Source: D. Elger, Die Kunstdenkmäler<br />
des Landes Schleswig-Holstein, 1952<br />
rich man. He had lived there for twenty<br />
years. He had arrived as a surgeon on a<br />
ship, but he was capable and so steadily<br />
advanced and later became the chief<br />
doctor of the island. In addition he<br />
made much money as a merchant with<br />
the East India Company. He married the<br />
daughter of a rich pharmacist and when<br />
she died he returned to Schleswig-Holstein.<br />
He bought a manor in the region<br />
of Angeln and as a reward for financing<br />
the plastering of the King’s New Market<br />
in Copenhagen the Danish King made<br />
him a ‘Baron of Gelting’. To his village<br />
of birth, Langenhorn, Sönke Ingwersen<br />
donated an organ that can still be seen<br />
and heard in the church of St. Laurentius.<br />
So this returning emigrant left<br />
traces that are still visible today and his<br />
life resembles the later typical story of<br />
rags to riches.<br />
Again some hundred years later Peter<br />
Simon Detlef Bahnsen born 1800 in<br />
Schleswig went to West-India. 6 Being<br />
twenty years of age he tried to make<br />
his fortune on the Caribbean island St.<br />
Thomas, which then belonged to Denmark.<br />
His father Bahne Bahnsen had<br />
been born on the Frisian island Nordstrand<br />
and later became a schoolmaster<br />
and organist in Schleswig, the capital<br />
of Schleswig-Holstein. So his son Peter<br />
Simon likely received a good education<br />
education which surely was useful to<br />
him as a merchant on St. Thomas. He<br />
became a successful dealer in coal owning<br />
his own ships. After ten years in the<br />
Caribbean he married Maria Elizabeth<br />
Wood, the widow of the Danish General-Governor<br />
and in 1840 the family<br />
returned to Europe. Rich enough after<br />
that, he bought the estate Hintschendorf<br />
near Hamburg, and there was<br />
enough money left for the next two<br />
generations to spend. One unmarried<br />
daughter, Maria, was called the ‘Public<br />
Bank of Reinbek’. From his pay as a
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