Christina Lalanne opens the worn notebook and traces a finger along the slanting script.
The text is written in Danish, which Lalanne doesn’t speak, and it’s jotted in an archaic hand that’s hard to decipher. To many people, it would look like gibberish, but not Lalanne.
Sitting at her dining room table, she flips to a random page and scans the yellowed paper. “Ah, mill builder,” she says, pointing to a word mid-paragraph. Then, from memory and recognition, she starts building the story around it. It’s the tale of a Danish carpenter who immigrated to San Francisco in the early years of the 20th century and the young woman he ventured across the world to find.
That story literally fell into Lalanne’s life in January 2019, when a 119-year-old diary slipped from her basement ceiling during seismic retrofitting. Others might have skimmed the foreign words and set it aside as a curious relic, but Lalanne was captivated. Over the next two years she followed its breadcrumbs through census records and newspaper archives, across the Atlantic and deep into the history of San Francisco and her own past.
Because, once Lalanne unlocked what the pages contained, she felt an overwhelming responsibility to share it. To make sure the words scrawled in a diary and hidden in the ceiling of a house in San Francisco for more than 100 years would not be lost to history.
Lalanne and her husband, Mat Temmerman, were looking for a project when they purchased the Sunset District house near the intersection of 20th Avenue and Irving Street in 2015. They were taken with the oddities of its construction and the vintage hand-painted murals adorning the walls.
A scene of early 1900s San Francisco stretches around the dining room: Mission Dolores with Twin Peaks’ barren hills rising in the background, Spanish galleons docked along the bay, a drunk slumped against a building while a miner strides Dolores Street into the distance.
The price was more than they wanted to spend, but Lalanne knew immediately: This would be their home.
“I’ve been in hundreds of old houses here in the city, but I’d never seen anything like it before,” she says. “This one just so clearly came from somebody’s imagination.”
It took about five minutes to find out whose. With a few online newspaper archive searches, Lalanne had a name: Hans Jorgen Hansen, a Danish immigrant and carpenter who arrived in the United States in 1904.
Hansen built the home as his own at age 30 in 1910, laying the parquet floors with contrasting inlays in the dining room and installing the stained-glass tulips by the front door.
He lived there with his wife, Christine, and their three children, back when developers were starting to sculpt the area’s sand dunes into housing lots, and a diverse community of immigrant laborers was moving to San Francisco’s west side to put down roots and take up work.
As Lalanne set about restoring the property, she amassed a trove of artifacts that spoke to its past, plucked from corners or revealed as she took the house apart and put it back together: an advertisement for a tailoring business stashed under the floor tiles; building plans jotted in Hansen’s tilted script; a stack of court summonses alleging he had neglected to pay his subcontractors; and a full set of dentures, smiling up from a crumpled paper bag.
Then there was the wood. The house, Lalanne says, had been “battered into conformity” ahead of the sale, its graceful oak buffet and grand mahogany mantel hidden beneath layers of thick white paint.
Lalanne has spent the past six years stripping it, replacing modern minimalism with Bradbury & Bradbury patterned wallpaper and glowing refurbished wood. She compares the transformation to the scene from “The Wizard of Oz,” when Dorothy steps from sepia-toned Kansas into vibrant Technicolor.
“I love stripping,” Lalanne says on a spring afternoon earlier this year, just days after finishing the foyer carved from richly grained fir. “It’s a way to enact physical change in the world, and it’s the way it was supposed to be.”
Learning the diary’s secrets would become a similar calling. The more she uncovered, the more compelled she felt to continue.
It is not uncommon to find antique documents in historic homes in San Francisco. There are scraps of the past tucked beneath floorboards and wedged behind fixtures all over the city.
“These homes have been lived in for over 100 years,” says Nicole Meldahl, executive director of the Western Neighborhoods Project, which has a collection of photographs, art and artifacts from the western realms of San Francisco. “Builders would stash things in the walls and the ceilings.”
One night in 2019, when Lalanne and Temmerman were having soft-story earthquake work done, the Wi-Fi cut out. Temmerman went down to the basement to reset the modem and found a pile of debris shoved into a plastic bucket destined for the trash. Mixed in with the dirt were two faded notebooks.
Back upstairs, he held the journals behind his back. “No amount of hype will oversell what I’ve found,” Temmerman said.
The next moments were kind of a blur. They leafed through the books and laid out a railroad map of the American West, split at the seams, that was tucked inside. The opening page of one volume had a date: January 1, 1900. Lalanne stared at the handwriting with a flash of recognition.
“I know his name,” she said.
If the fact of the diary’s existence isn’t particularly unusual, Meldahl says Lalanne’s reaction was. “Christina is incredibly rare and unique in that she cared to keep it.”
Lalanne, 36, grew up in Forest Hill, a fourth-generation San Franciscan whose great-grandfather emigrated from France around the same time as Hansen arrived. When she was young, her parents died a year apart, leaving Lalanne and her three siblings as orphans when she was only 9. The four children were split between two relatives; Lalanne was raised by an aunt and uncle who lived two doors down.
Even as a child, she had an appreciation for the historic architecture of her neighborhood, turreted Tudors next to Norman chateaus. After she moved into Hansen’s century-old home, Lalanne learned a grade-school classmate had lived there growing up. Perhaps, she muses, she played there as a kid. But Lalanne can’t remember now. It just hovers as a possibility, a small, unknowable detail among so many.
At times, she feels like she was meant to own the home, meant to unravel the diary’s secrets and share them. In a sense, she’s the ideal person for the job. A historian with a master’s degree in historical preservation, she has spent the past 15 years as a tour guide, leading busloads of travelers around the monuments of Washington, D.C., and the national parks of the American Southwest.
She is, in essence, a professional storyteller.
To tell Hansen’s story, though, Lalanne first had to understand it. The diaries were written largely in Danish. When Lalanne showed the text to some acquaintances from Denmark, their responses amounted to benevolent shrugs. The turn-of-the-century cursive was too hard to comprehend.
So, Lalanne decided to translate them herself. Letter by letter, she typed the words into Google Translate, but the first blocks returned nonsense — a jumble of letters that were neither Danish nor English.
“I was basically just sitting there staring at those words, and the enigma of it all just kind of ate at me,” Lalanne says. For months, all her spare time was spent typing Danish into the translator.
Her husband estimates she spent hundreds of hours that way, head swiveling between paper and screen. But as she learned to decipher Hansen’s handwriting, first words, then sentences, then a narrative began to take shape.
Hans Jorgen Hansen’s diary, or dagbog, begins on New Year’s Day in a new century. He had set out from home — a speck-on-the-map coastal village called Husby — to find work, he writes, but his sights were set on farther shores. He was 20 years old, a carpenter’s apprentice dreaming of America and the life that might await him there.
The passages that followed could have told a classic tale of immigrant ambition, except for a second set of handwriting hidden within the pages: a stretch of entries made five years after Hansen’s opening lines, and five years before he would build the house in San Francisco he shared with Christine.
They were written in English, and signed “Anna.”
Faaborg, Denmark, April 10, 1900
Today I am so happy and light in mind, for I dreamed last night that Anna had come home, and we were then such intimate friends that I took her outside, and we walked together for a long time. And I who, however, do not believe in dreams, I am as happy today as anyone would have given me a thousand kroner.
Hans was a teenage farmhand, tending cows in Husby, when he caught sight of her: Anna, a young woman from a nearby town.
“I saw my friend for the first time and in my quiet mind I imagined myself and Anna engaged,” Hans recalled in the diary.
Soon they were both working for a local widow, the seeds of a relationship starting to grow. Both were peasants from the Danish countryside, both uægte, or illegitimate children. Hans had no money, but he decided then that their future lay together. Someday, he would marry Anna.
But in 1897 Anna left for America, and their budding romance was reduced to letters shipped back and forth across the Atlantic.
“These first letters smelled a little of girl-like shyness,” wrote Hans. “But since then we have become closer and have come to rely on each other.”
In Anna’s absence, Hans devoted himself to learning a trade, determined to become worthy of the woman he hoped to wed. “If she comes here and then I say no more, because I am too happy to possess this young girl’s true love,” he wrote.
But Anna would not return to Denmark, and Hans would embark on a long journey to reunite with her. By the time they saw each other again, eight years and thousands of miles from the farm in Husby, her life would be profoundly changed.
Even after Lalanne managed to translate most of the journal, she still had only the skeleton of a story. The entries covered just 10 years of Hans’ life, from 1900 to 1910, and the carpenter was an inconsistent correspondent.
In April 2019, four months after the books fell from the ceiling, Lalanne came to a decision. Summer travel season was around the corner, her schedule about to fill with bus tours of New York City and the Southwest. She could pay someone to pick their way through the remaining pages, or she could fly to Denmark, find the town where Hans and Anna met and ask for help. Maybe people there would be equally enchanted by the mystery of a long-dead local son and his life in California. Maybe walking the streets that Hans and Anna had traveled would knock the whole story loose.
Alone in Denmark, Lalanne flagged down strangers and visited town archives. She stood on the site of the former farmhouse where Hans and Anna had worked, interviewed elderly residents and set up shop in a cafe with a crew of eager volunteers, poring over documents and photocopied diary pages. The sole image of her from the trip shows Lalanne, diary in hand, smiling triumphantly in front of Vestergade 5 in the city of Odense, the spot where Hans bought his diary 119 years before.
Word of an American searching for historical information spread to Facebook, where a neighbor’s mother tagged amateur genealogist Hanne Oosterom. Oosterom spent a week tracking Hans and Anna through church parish books, government records and into the Swedish national archive, uncovering that Anna, born to a Swedish mother, had immigrated to the United States with her paternal grandmother.
“It’s like a puzzle,” Oosterom said over Skype from Denmark. “I think I helped her with some of the puzzle pieces, so she can better see the whole picture.”
Assembling that picture became a compulsion for Lalanne. Some nights she would stay up for hours, typing queries into Ancestry.com on her iPad, hunting for a home address or death certificate that might connect the dots or create a new one.
And the more information she gathered, the more it corroborated what was in the diary — and hinted at what might have happened after Hans quit writing.
The Atavist is an online magazine that publishes just one story each month — juicy, long-form tales about, say, an informant who duped the FBI or pet detectives on the trail of a feline serial killer. Lalanne’s pitch to the publication was a historical romance from a writer who had never been published before, but something about it caught editor Seyward Darby’s eye.
“Even that first email was just so well-crafted,” Darby said, recalling a description of Lalanne’s home so vivid she felt like she was walking the halls. “She had all of the right words for the space.”
But when Lalanne sent along her first draft, Darby’s heart sank. She could imagine the best possible version of the essay Lalanne wanted to write, but she couldn’t see the path to getting there. “I like the story so much,” Darby told Lalanne over email. “The thing I keep tripping up on is how it changed you.”
Obsessed with unraveling the mystery of Hans and Anna, Lalanne had resolved to share their story with the world, but she squirms slightly when the conversation turns to her personal connection to their journey. “To be asked to bring myself into the story, it was like, I don’t actually think I can do that.”
During a normal summer, Lalanne would have been too busy to do the hard, introspective edits the Atavist wanted. But when the pandemic hit, her work went into hibernation. Suddenly, she was stuck inside the house that Hans built, with nothing but time to tease out her own place in his story.
“I’m not generally this determined in anything else that I do,” says Lalanne. “I surprised myself even, because what I realized is I obviously had something I really wanted to say. And I was determined to be able to say that, even if it meant dragging myself into it.”
Last November, the tale of the diary became her first published piece of writing, an essay in the Atavist that has drawn interest from Hollywood.
“I just felt so strongly that there were things that we could learn,” Lalanne says. “If we didn’t just completely keep erasing everything, then maybe we would have a better time in life.
“If we could just learn from people in the past.”
St. Joseph, Mich., Dec. 30, 1905
In all the years I have been in America I haven’t been happy. I have always had something to make life hard for me. … And now I am again sad. Sad because I have again sent you out in the world alone. But never forget that I am always with you and always will be. If you go to the end of the world, you shall always get letters from me for our friendship nobody can ever break. … You and I are too much one and therefore can they do nothing. – Anna
When Hans next saw Anna again, it was 1905. In Denmark, he had dreamed of the West. But first he sailed east, joining other young men from the Danish countryside seeking their fortunes in Australia. He logged timber and marveled at the alien heat, before eventually booking passage to America, arriving in California in 1904.
The next year, he traveled to Chicago to see Anna, who had settled in St. Joseph, Mich., near relatives. In their years apart, she had married. Lalanne describes her husband, Emil Frost, as the town drunk, arrested for public intoxication and fined for selling a dead skunk out of season.
Hans didn’t write what he expected of the visit. He might have hoped to rekindle old feelings and return to California together. He might have intended to say goodbye and close a chapter of his emotional life. What we do know is this: He gave Anna his diary.
Anna’s own entries in the notebook, drafted in English in dramatic prose, stretch over two months. “Oh how my heart ached for you the day we left Chicago. I sat like a dead woman all the way home,” she wrote. “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.”
Her writings all follow a similar pattern: She loves Hans, but is committed to her husband. Maybe, she suggests, they can reunite in Denmark. Fate will do its work, she vows. God will bring them together.
But God did not. And after she returned Hans’ journals to him, his entries grew sporadic and increasingly bitter.
“Sometimes I could curse everything, and sometimes I blame you that I am a migrant on earth,” Hans wrote in an undated passage. “But I still have to settle down, and I’ll find a faithful little girl who wants to share everything with me. I’ll marry to show you that I can live besides you too.”
On April 18, 1906, the Great San Francisco Earthquake struck, leveling large swaths of the city and igniting a fire that raged over 4.7 square miles and left more than half of the city’s population homeless. San Francisco would set about rebuilding, and Hans was a builder.
Back in California, he worked as a carpenter, erecting homes on the city’s west side. In September 1910, as he was constructing the house on 20th Avenue and just three months before he would marry Christine, Hans picked up the diary one last time.
“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 her again for a long time. And yet her and no other is what my life is all about. Anna, Anna, why is everything against me? … Goodnight, you are my life’s star … 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.”
There are still gaps in the story of Hans and Anna — documents missing or yet to be uncovered, questions that can’t be answered by census records and old news clippings. Lalanne, for instance, has never seen a picture of Hans. The only image she has of Anna is a 1921 passport photo, showing a serious-looking woman in a dark hat.
But she feels intrinsically linked to the pair of Danish immigrants. “The thing that I really struggle with, and that I struggled with trying to tell in the story, is the fatedness of it all,” she says. “Because, what are the chances that the diary still exists, and that it’s interesting, and that I’m the one who found it?”
“At the risk of sounding a little woohoo, there are forces at work,” says the Western Neighborhoods Project’s Meldahl. “There are forces that kept Hans and Anna apart; there are forces that brought Christina into their story. History isn’t as linear as we think it is.”
Lalanne’s connection to that history has been a defining element of her worldview. It links her to her parents, to the wooden trim she spent years uncovering and the stories she weaves for clients on tour. And, over the last two years, it has carried her through the search for Hans and Anna, and been reinforced by what she found along the way.
“I don’t think I knew myself why I was so determined to tell that story. I really wanted to say that if I hadn’t fixed up this house, if I hadn’t gone down this journey, no one would know this story,” she says.
“Isn’t it a worse world if we didn’t?”
Today in San Francisco, Lalanne says, we “worship the creators,” people who disrupt the status quo and construct something shiny and new. But “there’s such heroism and beauty in actually preserving something. What if we took a moment and revered the people who did that?”
For Lalanne, that lesson started long ago, before she uncovered a doomed love story, before a pair of notebooks fell from her basement ceiling, before she started stripping a travesty of white paint or even stepped into the house at 20th Avenue and Irving Street. It’s a lesson she has been learning her entire life.
At 4:30 a.m. one morning during her research, Lalanne was sitting in bed, typing queries into her iPad before sunrise. She’d found evidence that Anna had left her miscreant husband, but her trail had run cold in Michigan. Lalanne had been searching under her maiden name, coming up empty. Suddenly, she decided to try her married name, and there she was: Anna Frost, divorced and living, of all places, in San Francisco in 1910.
Had she come for Hans?
“I can think of no other reason for her to be here,” Lalanne says. “She had no family here. She had no reason to be here, except for him.”
The later decades of Hans’ and Anna’s lives are rough sketches at best; there are no diary entries to fill in the details. Hans and his wife, Christine, divorced in 1927. Anna remarried in San Francisco in 1911, and then was widowed.
But Lalanne found a pair of addresses, just a few blocks apart in the Tenderloin, where Hans and Anna apparently spent their older years. She likes to imagine them walking the streets of San Francisco. Together, at last.
