Hanne Moor

Hanne Moor spent her working life cutting peat on the marshland known as The Osmoor, near Marschau, where she was born on 7 July 1861. Beyond the circumstances of her one recorded find, the register preserves little of her life; no offices, marriages or public appearances are attributed to her other than the events set out below. She died on 15 April 1939, at the age of seventy-seven.

Early life

The record is silent on Moor's parentage, education and the household into which she was born. She is entered as a native of Marschau, in The Osmoor, and as a peat cutter by occupation, a trade she is presumed to have followed from an early age given the district's economy and the absence of any other trade recorded against her name. Portraits made of her in later years show a square, strongly built woman with her hair tied back under a cloth, in keeping with the working dress of cutters on the moor.

Career

Moor's occupation was that of a peat cutter, work carried out on the Osmoor by hand and by long custom, and it is this trade that placed her, on 12 September 1893, at the point in the marsh where she drew up a coin bearing a script that has not been identified. She sold the coin to the Museum for forty marka, a transaction that constitutes the whole of her recorded dealing with any public institution. No further finds, sales or transactions are entered against her name in the years that followed, and she appears to have continued in her trade without further note in the record.

Moor was interviewed once concerning the coin, in 1931, some thirty-eight years after the find. Asked, it may be presumed, about the place and manner of its recovery, she is recorded as having said only that the water there was "very deep for a marsh." No further remark of hers survives from that interview or from any other occasion.

• 12 September 1893, The Osmoor: Moor drew a coin of unknown script from the marsh and afterward sold it to the Museum for forty marka. Report.
• 1931, The Osmoor: Moor was interviewed concerning the find of 1893 and remarked that the water there was "very deep for a marsh." Report.

Later life

Nothing is recorded of Moor's circumstances between the sale of the coin in 1893 and her interview of 1931, nor between that interview and her death in 1939. No later address, employer, or companion is entered against her name, and she does not appear again in the register after the account of the interview.

Family

No relations are recorded for Hanne Moor. No marriage, children, or siblings appear in the register under her name.

Legacy

Moor's name is preserved chiefly through the coin now held by the Museum, catalogued as having been recovered from the Osmoor in 1893 and purchased from her for forty marka. The script upon it has not been read, and no further account of its origin exists beyond the fact and manner of its recovery. Her single recorded sentence, given at seventy years of age, remains the only description on file of the place from which it came.