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Writer finds a diary hidden for more than a century in an old San Francisco home that held the secrets behind a love affair that spanned two Danes' lives and their move to America

A writer and her husband, who purchased an old San Francisco home, discovered a century-old secret diary and love letters that had been hidden in the basement by a Danish man yearning to be with the woman he was truly in love with.  

Christina Lalanne shared details of the discovery in her story Castles in the Sky, which was published in The Atavist Magazine.

Lalanne and her husband, Mat, were renovating the home, which was built in 1910 by Hans Jorgen Hansen, when the documents were found. 

Hansen's name was inscribed in the diary, but his name wasn't the only one. A woman by the name of Anna had also written in it.   

According to Lalanne, Mat came across the letters and the diary when they fell from the basement's ceiling one evening while he was resetting the modem for their television. 

'Our basement had been torn apart for several months because we were doing a seismic retrofit. The steps I soon heard Mat walking back up were also in need of an upgrade,' Lalanne writs. 'The wood that at some point had been used to repair the staircase was cheap, and the sound the steps made underfoot was loudly hollow. 

'He flung open the door to the room where I was waiting and held out a book, its marbled cover torn and thick with dust.'

Christina Lalanne (pictured with visiting Denmark in 2019) who purchased an old San Francisco home, discovered a century-old secret diary and love letters that had been hidden in the basement by a Danish man yearning for the embrace of a woman he was in love with

Christina Lalanne (pictured with visiting Denmark in 2019) who purchased an old San Francisco home, discovered a century-old secret diary and love letters that had been hidden in the basement by a Danish man yearning for the embrace of a woman he was in love with

Lalanne and her husband, Mat, were renovating the home, which was built in 1910 by Hans Jorgen Hansen, when the documents were found

Lalanne and her husband, Mat, were renovating the home, which was built in 1910 by Hans Jorgen Hansen, when the documents were found

Lalanne sought out help to translate the documents (pictured) which were mostly written in Danish

Lalanne sought out help to translate the documents which were mostly written in Danish 

Lalanne said when she opened the cover, she saw in 'elegant handwriting the name Hans Jorgen Hansen and the year 1900'.

'As I turned the pages, I noticed that someone else had written on them, too, a woman named Anna. How unusual, I thought, for two people to share a diary—even more so because, according to historical records, Hans’s wife was named Christine,' Lalanne wrote. 

Before making the diary discovery, Lalanne and Mat had done research on the home and found that Hansen had finished building it in 1910. 

Hansen, a Danish immigrant described as a carpenter and a contractor, had built many homes, but he had finished Lalanne's home when he was just 30 years old.

Lalanne explained that at first she could only read the sections written in English, with most others written in Danish. 

'Dear Anna… Tonight I have been reading over and over again your old letters from the dear old time; but I must not dream the old dreams; but Oh Anna I can’t help it because I do love you in spite of all,' Hansen wrote in one section. 

In return, Anna wrote: 'Dear Hans… I am to blame for all you have ever suffered and God forgive me for it…. I am so sorry I was such a good for nothing foolish girl but at the same time I never meant to do any sin.'

Lalanne wrote that she sent a few diary passages to various Danish friends of friends, 'but while the language was theirs, none wanted to spend the time required to decipher such baroque penmanship'.

She then took matters into her own hands, figuring out some words and plugging them into Google Translate. At first the translations were only gibberish.

Lalanne continued to make out the letters the best she could and ultimately typed out every word for a total of 20,000. 

Their story then started to come to life, with Hansen writing about yearning to be in America where Anna had gone with her family. 

According to Lalanne, the diary revealed that in January 1900 Hansen loaded his suitcase into a wheelbarrow and set off down an icy road on the way to a train station. 

Hansen wrote in his diary for several years, professing his love to her on the pages

Hansen wrote in his diary for several years, professing his love to her on the pages 

At the station, he purchased a third-class ticket to the industrial city of Odense. In Odense, while waiting for a train transfer, Hansen walked into the town in search of a bookstore. 

With hopes of finding a book about America, he comes across journalist Henrik Cavling’s dispatches in From America, but he doesn't buy it. 

Instead, he purchased the diary, which he would ultimately take with him everywhere. 

According to Lalanne, he then continued his journey to Faaborg where he worked. 

'When he arrives, a letter is waiting for him. It’s from Anna in America,' Lalanne writes. 

'From the moment he first saw her, six years earlier in his village, Hans knew it was his destiny to be with her, the beautiful girl with black hair. It wasn’t her fault that she had to leave him. Anna lived with her grandparents, and she was only 14 when her grandfather died. She and her grandmother had no one else to rely on in the village, so they soon left for a place called Michigan, where Anna’s aunt lived,' Lalanne revealed. 

In addition to finding out information via the diary and letters, Lalanne said she and Mat also did some 'genealogical research, amassing supporting facts'.

'I found documentation of Anna and her grandmother’s 1897 passage to New York via Ellis Island. I found the household in St Joseph, Michigan, where Anna was employed. I found evidence of Hans’s departure from Denmark after his stint in Faaborg—a voyage to Sydney, Australia, and onward to Brisbane—as well as his death certificate and a record of his grave just outside San Francisco, which we visited.' she wrote. 

'We reconstructed Hans’s family tree and found a great-grandson on Facebook. We learned that Hans had three children with the woman named Christine, and that their marriage ended in divorce,' Lalanne added. 

 Lalanne shared more from the diary, also from January 1900. 

'There is not much to say, just that time was twice as long as the previous day,' he wrote.

According to Lalanne, Hansen wrote about imagining himself in New York where Anna will travel from Michigan to reunite with him. 

At one point, he writes that he has decided to 'learn something useful to be worthy of her'. He became a carpenter.   

In one section, he wrote: 'In my quiet mind, I imagined myself and Anna engaged.' 

He recalled how fate brought them together at age 16 while they worked as farmhands. 

Hansen described Anna as a 'witty endearing spirit'.

When Anna arrived in America, she and Hans began sending letters. They 'became closer and came to rely on each other'.

'I have seen many beautiful girls,' Hansen wrote. 'But no one has been able to erase the image of my dear black-haired girl with the brave and joyful mind.'

Certain that he and Anna will be reunited soon, Hansen hit a roadblock in his journey to America.  

Because traveling to America was so expensive, he found himself in the middle of the Indian Ocean on a steamship called Oroya heading toward Sydney around the end of 1900 and into 1901 

It was a 45-day journey and little did he know that his beloved Anna would be married to another man by the end of 1901.  

From Sydney, Hansen and other Danish men board another ship to Queensland. 

In April 1901, Hansen wrote that he had not received a letter from Anna since leaving Denmark. 

'I long to hear a little from little Anna in America,' Hans wrote, according to Lalanne.  'It is 6 months since I got the last letter from her but I wait every day.' 

Lalanne said details of when Anna 'decided to forsake Hans and how she told him weren’t contained in the diaries or letters that fell from my basement ceiling'.

Anna would later write, to Hansen explaining that she had gotten into 'trouble on my own.'

Though details about that message are unclear. 

For the next four years, Hansen didn't write in the diary, possibly suffering grief from the news that Anna had gotten married. 

But their love story was not over yet. In 1905, Anna wrote in his diary. 

Lalanne eventually made the trip to Denmark in 2019 to find the place with the lovebirds first met. 

She succeeded after getting the help from locals, who she also showed her binder full of photocopied diary entries.

Her search for the root of their story sparked enough interest that Lalanne was contacted by an amateur genealogist who 'sifted through Danish church records on my behalf, gathering information about Hans’s and Anna’s families'. 

When she finally found the area where Hans and Anna worked had been demolished, but it was still where their love story began.  

It's unclear if Hansen and Anna ever ended up together but Lalanne did discover that in the last decades of their lives they lived just three blocks from one another

It's unclear if Hansen and Anna ever ended up together but Lalanne did discover that in the last decades of their lives they lived just three blocks from one another 

Hansen eventually headed to the US. According to Lalanne, Hansen found San Francisco to be a marvelous party disguised as a city. 

While there he would play cards, bowl and gamble. 

In the fall of 1905, Hansen traveled to Chicago to meet Anna after eight years. 

Hansen described Anna as being the same kindhearted, buoyant young woman he remembered.

According his passages, Anna worked as a servant in wealthy households and was never truly happy in her marriage.

Lalanne writes: 'Anna’s marriage isn’t going well. Her husband, whom Hans meets in Chicago, is a mischievous and sometimes callous man. He was born in Germany. He loves to drink, sometimes with women who are not his wife. His name is Emil, but no one calls him that. Everyone calls him by his last name, Frost—even Anna.'

During an outing with Frost, he told Hansen that he 'would sell Anna to him for $500'. 

'Then he pretends it was a joke all along. Ha! Frost says he couldn’t live without her anyway. Later, Frost tells his wife that Hans "didn’t care enough…. I won’t let him have you now."'

During one of Anna's visits to Chicago to meet up with Hansen, the pair had dinner.  

After their dinner, Anna wrote: 'It is God’s will that when you and I again get together it will be under different circumstances.'

According to Lalanne, Anna returned home to Michigan with Hansen's diary and reads his words from 1900. 

She scribbled that her heart 'almost stood still' on one of the pages. 

When she gave the diary back, she made sure to let Hansen know her feelings as well, writing: 'Oh how my heart ached for you the day we left Chicago. I sat like a dead woman all the way home. Frost talked and I could not answer. 

'I think that was the saddest day of my life. How I would love to be with you but I can’t until God wills it so…. My beloved brother life would be empty if it were not for you…. We were born to each other I feel it,' she wrote.   

In her final entry she wrote: 'I would be the happiest woman in the world if I could always be with you but there would be one little drop in our cup and that would be that I would always fear that I had done a sin.

'In parting us this time, also saved us from the results of what we would have done.'

In response, Hansen wrote: 'You are all I have and you are as welcome as flowers in May. I am always waiting for you to pay me a visit or to stay forever.

'You and I little Anna could be happy; but you set me apart for another.… Anyway, I am not angry with you in any way,' he wrote. 

Hansen returned to San Francisco in 1906 after an earthquake left the city almost unrecognizable. 

Two hundred thousand people were left homeless and the city was asking for skilled men who were needed to build the city back up. 

Hansen's diary entries weren't as frequent as they had been and in August 1908 he wrote: 'The sadness is coming over me again.'

His last entry is dated for September 19, 1910 when he finished building the house that Lalanne now lives in.   

'Many years have gone since I last wrote in my book, and I have to talk to someone tonight…. My whole life has been destroyed and I have now been away from for a long time. And yet her and no other is what my life is all about,' Hansen wrote at the time. 

'Anna, Anna why is everything against me. Everyone tells me I’m crazy, because I am not taking any interest in anyone but you. I shall always keep you in my mind and treasure your memories and keep them for myself. Goodnight, you are my life’s star, without you everything is empty and you never want to write to me. Everything that I have is your letters and the memory of you. Goodnight my beloved friend, you are my everything. Hope disappears. I hope it will rise again,' he ended. 

After writing that section, Hansen likely stashed his diary and their letters in the ceiling of the basement. 

In December 1910, Hansen married Christine Petersen. 

'Hansen and Christine’s great-grandson told me that their marriage was not a happy one,' Lalanne wrote. 

'Their divorce was contentious, and Hans was not remembered fondly by his descendants,' she added. 


Hansen and Anna both lived to be in their 80s. He died in 1966 and Anna in 1968.

Lalanne said she tried to search for more information about their later lives, but she was only able to find census data up to 1940. 

She did find Hansen and Christine’s great-grandson who told her that St Joseph, Michigan, sounded familiar, but he wasn’t sure why.

Eventually, Lalanne figured out Anna's birthday, where she was born and her date of entry into the US. She also knew that Anna's mother was Swedish and her father was Danish. Lalanne was also able to find her application for a passport. She also knew that Anna was 25 when she divorced Emil Frost.

'These facts are what made me sure that the Anna I came across on Ancestry.com was unmistakably, irrefutably her. My heart leaped in my chest. Then it fell, because of where I found her and what it might mean. She wasn’t in Michigan or Chicago or Denmark. Anna had been in San Francisco all along,' Lalanne wrote. 

According to the information she found, Anna had moved to San Francisco by at least 1910. 

'What reason could there have been but Hans?' Lalanne questioned, while also revealed that two months later, Hansen got married to Christine and Anna married a man named L.B. Carpenter. 

Ann and Carpenter, a mining engineer, never had children. He died in 1929.

At the same time, Hansen got a divorce from Christine, but he never regained his financial footing following their separation. The house that Lalanne currently lives in went to Christine and her brother as part of their divorce. 

Lalanne said he moved into a residential hotel in the Tenderloin after the divorce.  

In the last decades of Anna's life, she also moved into an apartment building in the Tenderloin.

She lived only three blocks away from Hansen, which Lalanne concluded could be a coincidence or it could be more. 

'I remembered the words of their youth,' Lalanne wrote, noting a passage that Hansen had written. 

'I know that sometime a time will come when Anna and I are together,' he wrote. 'A voice whispers in my ear that (Everything comes to those who wait) and I will wait for you to come in 20 years.' 

Anna once wrote: 'When you and I get to be 80 years old I shall love you just the same no matter where you are…. Never forget that I am always with you and always will be, if you go to the end of the world.' 

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