Hans and Catherina were married in Belle Prairie, Nebraska in 1878
Four of their children, from left, Marie (seated), Maggie, Peter (seated) and Alfred, early 1900
Hans and Catherina's first five children were born in Nebraska, where Hans and his father Lorenz worked as farmers on their own land. Catherina's parents, Peter Hansen Petersen and Elise Momsen Petersen, and her brothers lived nearby.
We don't have death dates for Catherina's parents (it was probably before 1889 because the grown children began relocating after that time). Margaretha, Hans' mother, died in 1882 and was buried in St. Johannes Cemetery near Belle Prairie. Catherina's brothers remained in Nebraska with the exception of Andrew, who settled in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin.
Around 1889 Hans, Catherina, their children, and Hans' father Lorenz moved to a Chicago suburb, then called Lake. They lived at 4735 South Paulina Street, a structure that still exists today. Hans' father Lorenz, who had remarried a lady called Eliza from Baden, died in October 1891 in Chicago and was buried at Greenwood Cememtery (now called Mt. Greenwood Cemetery) in Blue Island, a quiet suburb of Chicago.
About 1900 the family joined Andrew in Wisconsin, settling in Maunton and south Milwaukee. Hans and Catherina's last child, Clarence, their eleventh, was born in Wisconsin.
The couple had lost four young children to illness in the 1880s and 1890s. In 1903 their eldest daughter Maggie died as well; you can read the sad circumstances in the West Bend Pilot, a regional newspaper. In 1905 Hans Petersen, himself unwell, died in a drowning accident near the family home in Brookfield; he was only 55 years old.
Catherina returned to Chicago later that year to live with her children Peter, Alfred, George, Marie and Clarence, and to be closer to her eldest son Louis and his wife Anna Majoros. Widowed Catherina married Thomas Mikkelsen in November 1906 and they had a daughter, Florence. Thomas worked as an auto and streetcar mechanic and died in 1921. Catherine remained in Chicago close to family members until she died at the age of eighty-one in 1944. She's buried at Mt. Greenwood.