MySource talk:BobC/Billy the Kid and the Mormons

Online Responses to Original Article: "Billy the Kid and the Mormons" [31 January 2012]

1. April 7th 2008 at 6:01 am Geoff B says: Clark, I bet all of us have horse thieves and kings in our genealogy somewhere. But you have actually looked into it. Great story.

2. April 7th 2008 at 6:30 am Brian Duffin says: Wow! What a story! My grandmother used to claim that she was related to Confederate General Robert E. Lee and John D. Lee (Lee’s Ferry, Mountain Meadows massacre), but my mom has been unable to find any link.

3. April 7th 2008 at 7:06 am Susan M says: I was hoping you were going to say you’d found another possible photograph of Joseph Smith. Cool stories.

4. April 7th 2008 at 7:08 am Ardis Parshall says: Oh, go ahead and give us the genealogical connection to the Pratts. One of my rules of thumb for initial evaluation of unfamiliar family history is to see how well genealogical claims are pinned down. Henry Bohne is the grandfather of some of my Piute County people, so I’m interested on a couple of levels.

5. April 7th 2008 at 9:41 am Clark Goble says: It’s kind of funny as the genealogy is pretty messed up. For instance none of the LDS family sealed Helsina to her last husband William Antrim. I can understand not sealing her to McCarty. She was sealed posthumously (presumably by the Bohnes in Mt. Pleasand) to her original husband. That was in 1894.

I didn’t mention the original husband in the above because, once again, the stories are a bit messed up. If she was 15 when she became the mistress of the King then something is odd since she already had a son (Jens Carl). So I think my cousin’s dating might be a tad off. But she was 38 when she came to America and already had Joseph Smith Bohne as a son. (He was 2 when she came to New York) So I think what happened is the king got rid of her by marrying her to one of his guards in the royal household. That or she was already married when the king took her as a mistress. Her original husband’s name was Magnus Carl Frederick Bohne. He dies in a sailing accident when on duty with the Navy in the Balkin Sea. I think it was his death that prompts her trip to New York and not the King. (Despite the family story.) So presumably after she leaves the King she joins the Church.

I suspect her shacking up with various men – even abusive men – is primarily out of desperation. As to why she didn’t go to Utah I just don’t know. I also am a bit dubious about the baptismal information on her son Henrich. If he was 11 when they came to America then one would have thought he’d already been baptized. Unfortunately as I said the genealogical and temple work is a mess. (Someone baptized Helsina in 1921 when obviously she was baptized while alive and she had her endowment done in 1859 in the endowment house)

So there’s still a lot of mystery to the story. I may try and clean up that genealogy as it really is a mess despite there being so many members related to these folks.

6. April 7th 2008 at 9:58 am Clark Goble says: Regarding the Pratts. The Wiki for Billy the Kid says that. Now that I check out the Wiki’s claims in more depth I’m pretty sure they are wrong. Part of the problem is that Hendrick Bohne was the first to switch over from patronymics. (It was around this time that most of the Scandanavian countries were switching to using last names) So his father was Heinrich Mortensen. I just don’t see the Pratts in the lines I see. Maybe via the McMarty’s? I don’t know.

Part of the problem is that the Church for years just let everyone submit their genealogy nilly willy and let anyone do temple work based on this. This means that often you get lots of folks who weren’t careful about genealogy submitting bad information. (The commonest error is confusing birth dates and christening dates – but there are lots of other errors, such as work being done for Helsina she didn’t need)

7. April 7th 2008 at 11:07 am Researcher says: Errors in the genealogy databases? You’ve got to be kidding. I wish

8. April 7th 2008 at 11:46 am Ardis Parshall says: I suspect that the genealogical claim is only the tip of a mountain of suspect details in the story, Clark. Parley and Orson Pratt’s genealogy is anchored on the American continent since colonial days, making it a little hard for there to be shared ancestry with a Danish immigrant of the mid-19th century. Tell you what, though — your cousin, as imaginative as he or she is, gets props for not proposing this picture of Billy the Kid as a heretofore unknown Joseph Smith image.

9. April 7th 2008 at 12:11 pm Clark Goble says: A lot of it I can verify. For instance I have the ship manifest here for Helsina Bohne. (That’s what led me to decide to post the above.) And the claims about the Bohne’s in Utah are established. They also appear to have done the work for Helsina and so forth. Whether Joe killed Pat Garret is more debatable but the evidence sure fits. As I said, the Orson Pratt bit I’d never heard before until I saw the wiki. I spent about a half hour at the Church’s genealogical site and I’m pretty sure that’s wrong. Although the claim was a common grandfather as I recall.

10. April 7th 2008 at 1:13 pm Clark Goble says: OK, some things I think I’ve falsified. I might do a followup post later this week after a visit to SLC and the archives there.

11. April 8th 2008 at 6:26 pm Clark Goble says: OK, I did some more checking and I’m pretty sure my cousin’s genealogy is bogus. Mea culpa. Family was down and I thought it was a cool bit of genealogy I didn’t know. It is a family tradition but my person feeling is that there’s not much truth to it. Good call Ardis.

12. April 9th 2008 at 10:46 am Adam Greenwood says: Las Cruces.

13. April 10th 2008 at 9:38 am Clark Goble says: Oops. C’est la vie. On the bright side this got me into the Church’s genealogical programs to try and check out the details of my cousin’s claims.

14. April 10th 2008 at 5:04 pm Hans Hansen says: Question: “He dies in a sailing accident when on duty with the Navy in the Balkin Sea.” Hmmm…Danish Navy…are you sure he didn’t die on the Baltic Sea? …which makes sense if we’re talking about the Danish Navy. Can’t find the Balkin Sea on a map. BTW, my great-grandfather, Captain Ole Christian Hansen, was a graduate of the Kristiania Navigasjons Skole (Kristiania, now Oslo, School of Navigation). He was a harbot pilot and navigator for the Port of San Francisco after he emigrated to the US in 1890.

15. April 21st 2008 at 7:39 pm Talon says:In the late 1980′s Richard Bohne of Raymond, Alberta was one of the deadliest shooters I have ever seen….he was money from the three point line. Never connected him with Billy the Kid, but must be a relative of some sort….very interesting.

16. April 22nd 2008 at 1:55 pm Clark Goble says: Talon, doing more research I’ve become pretty skeptical that her story of Billy the Kid and the Bohnes is correct. The history of Billy the Kid’s mom just doesn’t line up with what I can see in the history of Helsina. Unfortunately no one has much beyond the geneology. So just because some of the names and dates line up I’m not convinced there’s fact to it. It is true this is a family tradition going back to at least the early 20th century if not earlier. But I’m a bit dubious at this stage.

17. March 13th 2011 at 2:40 pm Gwen Fillingim says: This woman is my 4th great Grandmother and there is a lot of incorrect info. in your post. Hendrick was actually the eldest of 6 children all of which were born before leaving Denmark on the Westmorland in 1857. She never went around with a bunch of men after arriving here in the US. She remarried within a short time to Svend Larsen, and they went on to have two more children. The entire family was in Utah within a few years of arriving in the United States(before Feb. 1861).--BobC 08:15, 31 January 2012 (EST)