♀Botilla Peters

Botilla Peters (about 1713 – December 1788) was the wife of Caspar Andersen, a farmer at Rørkær in the parish of Hostrup, near Tønder in the Duchy of Schleswig^W, and the mother of eight children who outlived her. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her daughter Agnetha Caspersen (died before 1815).

Family

She was born about 1713, the daughter of a Rørkær farmer named Peter and his wife Ingeburg. The register that records her burial names her father as Peter, a Hufner (landholding farmer) of Rørkær, but his surname cannot be read with certainty; both her parents were dead by 1788. Her maiden name is Peters: the marriage entry of her daughter in 1782 gives her mother as “geborene Peters”, and a godmother entered as “Botela Peters” at a baptism in January 1745 was most likely she, still using that name.

She married Caspar Andersen, and the couple’s children were baptized at Hostrup between December 1738 and October 1756, all as children of Rørkær. The clerks wrote her given name as Bodel, Bohtela or Botela; her burial gives it as Botilla. Eight of the children were living when she died, among them Agnetha, who had married Peter Nielsen of Rørkær in January 1782 and whose own baptism has not been identified. Another of the eight, a son Peter, has no baptism among those found.

Death

She died at Rørkær in December 1788, aged 75, and was buried at Hostrup on 20 December. The register corrected the day of her death, and the correction cannot be read. The entry calls Caspar weyland, “late”, so he had died before her, and it names all eight surviving children, Agnetha among them. After her 1782 marriage entry, it is the second record to tie Agnetha to this couple.

Notes

• The given name in the 1782 marriage entry is hard to read; the letters that can be made out fit the form the baptisms and the burial give.
• The father’s surname in the burial entry begins like Petersen and agrees with her maiden name, but it is not a clean reading. Her mother’s maiden name is read as Lorenzen, also without certainty.
• A name index gives the day of death as 16 December; the register entry itself cannot be read for the day.
• The baptisms write her husband as Casper Andersen or Casper Andresen.