♀Catharina Peters

Catharina Peters (13 August 1784 – 7 November 1825) was the daughter of a landless lodger in Hostrup parish, near Tønder in the Duchy of Schleswig, who was baptised Cathrina Caspers Petersen, carrying her mother’s family name as a middle name, and who married the Jutland-born cottager Laust Jensen (1783–1868) at Rørkær in 1815. She was the third great-grandmother of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), through her son Peter Nikolai Jensen (1820–1894).

Early life

She was born in the village of Hostrup on 13 August 1784 and baptized in the parish church a week later, on 20 August. The register, kept in German as the Schleswig registers then were, names her parents as Peter Nielsen, an Inste or landless lodger in Hostrup, and his wife Agnetha, née Caspersen, who had married at Hostrup on 26 January 1782, and enters the child as Cathrina Caspers Petersen: Petersen after her father’s given name, in the Danish patronymic custom, and Caspers from her mother’s family. Two of her three godparents came from the nearby hamlet of Rørkær, one of them a woman named Anna Caspersen. Hostrup lay then under the Danish crown; it passed to Prussia in 1864 and returned to Denmark in 1920.

Her father died at Rørkær in February 1793, when she was eight. His burial entry names three surviving children, Nicolaj, Catharina and An Botilla, and a brother, Peder, was born to their widowed mother on 4 September 1793.

Marriage and family

On 9 December 1815, at Rørkær, she married Laust Jensen, a bachelor from Jutland. The marriage register calls her “Cathrina Peters”, the unmarried daughter of the late Peter Nielsen, Inste, and his late wife, so by the time of the wedding, when she was 31, both of her parents were dead. The couple lived in the villages of Hostrup parish, and three sons were born to them at Jejsing: Jens Peter in 1816, Peter Nikolai on 1 January 1820 and Matthias in 1823. The parish index gives Matthias’s death as 1831. Peter Nikolai’s burial entry in 1894 still names his mother as Catharina, née Peters.

Later life

Laust Jensen died at Solderup, in the same parish, on 21 July 1868. His burial register calls him Ehemann, a married man, but the entry does not say to whom, and the census of 1845 already lists him with a wife of a different name. Catharina died at Jejsing on 7 November 1825, aged 41, and was buried at Hostrup on 12 November. The death entry, which writes her name as “Anna Catrina Peters”, calls her the wife of Laust Jensen of Jeising and says she was survived by three sons.

Notes

The 1815 marriage register names the bride’s mother as Agatha rather than Agnetha, and gives her a maiden name after “geb.” that has not been deciphered; it is not Caspersen. The baptism of 1784, written while the mother was alive and with a Caspersen standing as godmother, is the clearer record and is followed here. A family chart compiled in 1994 gave the mother’s surname, with its compiler’s own question mark, as Torgers; no record supports that reading. The same chart supplied the 1815 wedding date, which the Hostrup register confirms.