Catherina at fourteen from her confirmation portrait, 1876 in Niebüll, Schleswig-Holstein
Magretta Jensen, who married Lorenz Peter Petersen, from a portrait made in Flensburg before she came to the USA.
As mentioned in the history of our earliest Danes, Peder Hansen (born in 1774) was a tailor like his father Hans. He married Barbara Sørensdatter in October 1797 in her parish of Hostrup, Ribe and their first son, Hans Peter Petersen, arrived a month later. Although the family's marriage and children's births were recorded in Hostrup, the family is listed in the 1801 census for Øster Lindet in Haderslev in a village called Terp Bye, where only sixteen families lived and where Peder rented their home. Peder and Barbara's second son, Adam Lautzen Langer Petersen, was born in 1806.
Once their sons were grown, the couple seems to have relocated to Hostrup, where Peder's death is recorded in 1828. Son Hans Peter Petersen had settled in his wife's home town of Jundewandt (nowadays Jyndevadt), Tønder, just north of the border between Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein and several day's travel from his widowed mother's residence. Hans' brother Adam worked as a farmhand in Vibeck Bye, Alslev, Ribe.
The 1834 census showed Barbara living in a poorhouse in Hostrup parish as an "Almisselen", a pauper, though the poorhouse also housed people with mental illness or dementia, which could also have been her unfortunate fate. She died alone on a country road in 1842 at the age of 68; a kind gentleman brought her back to Hostrup church for burial.
Adam was a farmhand all his life and never married. He doesn't appear in census records after 1850. Hans married Ellen
Jürgensdatter, daughter of Lorentz Jürgensen and Anna Catharina Nissen, in
1822. Hans and Ellen had three children, one of whom was Peter Hansen Petersen (born 1822 in Jundewandt).
His 1844 marriage to Elise Christina Momsen (at left) produced six children, including twin sons.
Their only daughter Catherina (born 1862) is pictured above right.
Peter Hansen Petersen's brother Lorenz Peter Petersen (July 1825) and wife Margaretha Jensen (1816) had two sons, Hans Peter Petersen (born 1850) and Christian Hansen Petersen (1852). Lorenz and his family (minus Christian, about whom we know nothing) came to the USA in 1872 to farm in Belle Prairie, Nebraska, where land was inexpensive and where other Danish immigrants had settled; see the solicitation poster ("Why come to Nebraska?") in the list at left. Six years later brother Peter Hansen and his family joined them.
Within days of the family's arrival, cousins Catherina and Hans were married in Belle Prairie, Nebraska in November 1878 and over the next twenty-seven years lived in Belle Prairie and Hebron, Nebraska (1880s); Chicago, Illinois (1890s-1900), and Mauston and Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1900-1905).
Read more about Hans' and Catherina's family on the next page.