His first marriage to Ida Yahr, was recorded at Milnor Lutheran Church in Dakota Territory during November 1887.
They moved to Washington state in 1895, where he began patenting unusual guitar designs.
Most of the guitars produced by Knutsen have spruce tops, all have lateral or diagonal bracing on the back, also due to his eccentric building skills many of his guitars used some crude solutions such as: wide number of screws, brackets, wing nuts, sheared-off tuning machine plates, odd-shaped nuts and dressmaker's seam tape rather than wood strips to reinforce ribs and butt fitted back plates.
[3] Around 1914 he moved to Los Angeles, just as the Panama-California International Exposition ignited the Hawaiian music craze in the mainland United States.
Accordingly, Knutsen began to produce harp ukuleles and Hawaiian guitars to meet the new demand.