Christian Hinrichsen Godt was born on March 18th 1821. He was the third of five children of Christian Godt and Elisabeth Thulesen Hinrichsen, a widow. His father was a farmer in Rinkenaes and Buschmoos.

Christian Hinrichsen worked on ships, and eventually became captain of the ship Fidelitas. This ship was part of the Danish Merchant Marine Fleet. He may have been a part owner of the vessel. The ship had a crew of 18 men.

The Captain married Wilhelmine Frederike Volger, the daughter of Heinrich Volger and his wife Catharine Hillgen Volker. Heinrich Volger was a goldsmith in Hamburg. Christian Godt and his wife settled in Altona. Today Altona is a part of Hamburg, but at that time it was a suburb, on the border between Denmark and Prussia. Altona was a town in Holstein which at that time belonged to Denmark.

In 1866 Denmark lost the war against Prussia and Austria, and Schleswig and Holstein were occupied by Prussia. I guess the Mercantile Fleet was taken over by the Prussians, and the Captain and his wife and children left Altona and moved to Egernsund.

The Captain must have been a fairly wealthy man when he bought the Egernsund Ferry Inn. Together with the Inn came a farm, a bakery, a brewery and the ferry. The ferry was a rather small boat crossing the 200 - 300 metres of water seperating Egernsund from Rinkenaes. The current is rather strong, so the ferry was a chain ferry operated by man power at that time. The ferry existed until about 1970 when it was replaced by a bridge. Of course at that time it was powered by diesel engines.

The Captain himself operated the Ferry Inn together with a lady at the bar. His wife died on 10 February 1871. Her mother (the widow of the goldsmith) came from Hamburg to assist her son-in-law. She stayed there until he married the woman who ran the bar - Magdalene Christiane Jensen.

My father - Heinrich Friedrich Godt must have been about 11 years old when his father remarried. He and his younger brother (Wilhelm Johan Gustav - who later moved to Argentina to breed cattle), were sent to a boarding school in Broager where they stayed until my father was 14 or 15 years old. Then he was apprenticed to a store in Flensburg.

My father was not very strong. As a child he had an operation where the surgeon removed a piece of his hip. He therefore got a small grocery store near the Ferry Inn while his father was still alive.