Born in Stavanger, Norway of Feb. 3, 1824, she was the daughter of a man named Ole whose last name is unknown. At the time of Bertha’s birth, Scandinavians did not have family surnames that were passed from generation to generation. She was named Olsdatter, literally meaning daughter of Ole.

With her parents, Bertha Mary arrived in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn about 1850 and married Christian William Kirkemann in 1851 or ‘52. Her first child, Nelson (more probably Neilson for Christian’s father Neils) was born March 2, 1853 in Greenpoint. With her husband, Bertha moved to Little Neck, NY in 1857 where two additional children were born: Frederick on March 4, 1857 and Emma on April 4, 1860.

All family members who knew her or knew about her agreed Bertha Mary was uncommonly beautiful, hence her nickname "The Beautiful Norwegian." Her children spoke lovingly of her in the Captain’s obituaries, and after her death in Little Neck of July 17, 1895 at age 71 she was buried in a Zion Episcopal Church plot provided by her daughter, Mrs. Emma Reeve.

Bertha Mary apparently had difficulty learning English and may have spoken the language with a strong, lilting Scandinavian accent. In 1860, a census taker misunderstood Bertha Mary’s answers when she was interviewed in her Little Neck home. As a result, his census entries have many errors. In the census, Bertha said her first name was Mary.

So the faint, 120-year-old vibrations of Bertha Mary Olsdatter Kirkman indicate she was very beautiful, very loving, and very Norwegian. Unfortunately, she also was five years older than Christian and that apparently wrecked their marriage in the late 1870s.

The Captain’s second wife was Ellen Elizabeth Lee Sparrow Kirkman, eldest daughter of Joseph Lee of Bridgeport, CT. She was born in Boston, MA on Aug. 5, 1856, shortly after her parents emigrated to the United States from Manchester, England.

Ellen married a William Sparrow in the mid-1870s and had a son Edward Sparrow in 1879. Sparrow apparently abandoned her and rebounding Ellen married the Captain in the early 1880s. She gave the Captain his second family: Christian William III, born Dec. 22, 1852 in Bridgeport; Ellen Elizabeth II, June 26, 1887 in Manhattan, and Charles Edward, Feb. 12, 1889 in Jersey City, NJ.

It should be noted that the Captain’s two families were born three decades apart. His first son by Bertha was born in 1853 and his first son by Ellen in 1882.

The Captain’s late life second marriage caused a genealogical nightmare in the early 1880s as the wives of the Captain and his eldest son Nelson gave birth to sons that they both named Christian William Kirkman. Because Nelson’s child was born first (in 1880) this history refers to him as Christian William Kirkman II, and the Captain’s eldest son by Ellen (born in 1882) is called Christian William Kirkman III.

Both of the Captain’s families resided in Little Neck during the 1880s, ‘90s and 1900s, but there was little communication between them. That ended in the first decade of the 1900s when most of Bertha’s children moved to other locations in recently expanded New York City, and Ellen moved her children to midtown Manhattan.

To support her family Ellen worked as a nurse and in late life lived with her son Christian William Kirkman III in Minnesota and Manhattan. Pictures show she was a very large woman. She died in Manhattan on June 29, 1920 (age 63).

Ellen and one of her sisters maintained the Lees were descended from one of the Earls of Stratford which makes the Kirkmans distant, poor relations of English nobility.