The Petersen Family

[Lincoln Wonk]

Sorry, Roger, Jim, Laurie and everyone, I wanted to respond but was at my new job and without my paper files.

I've been researching the Petersens since 2009, but I never recorded William's middle initial, possibly because I don't use a middle initial myself or more probably because he's listed on the records I just viewed as just William, and listed that way on his gravestone as well. I’m still searching for his death certificate, which must be misfiled.

William Petersen had a lucrative tailoring business, buoyed by the demand for officer’s uniforms throughout the war years. Add his rental income from the boardinghouse, and he was wealthy enough to hire a servant and to send one of his daughters to Moravian Seminary for Young Ladies in Pennsylvania, a pricey academy some of the wealthiest girls in the nation attended.
The Petersens’ house, as anyone who has visited will attest, is a swell four-story brick building with marble fireplaces, dentil trim and a lovely curved porch. It didn’t sound that way from some newspapers’ descriptions on Black Easter weekend, though. Anna Petersen was depressed after she came home from her Holy Week travels to a house torn and tattered by souvenir hunters. It couldn’t have helped if she read a New York newspaper’s description of her house: “There is nothing about the building to make it attractive.” Or if she saw the erroneous report of a Washington City paper: “The frail Petersen house, built rather on a tenement style, will not long stand as a memento of the great man who died in it.”

Anna did have children over a wide span of years. William and Anna had seven surviving children in 1860. Karen Getzinger and Church of the Latter-Day Saints records both list them as William F., Louisa, Fertner or Fred, Pauline, Charles, Anna and Julia.
There's no indication that William was still living at home in 1865. He and his wife eventually moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as a druggist. Fred was a teen on assassination night, but he later co-owned a Pennsylvania Avenue rug market. Louisa’s husband and son eventually ran a popular Chicago restaurant, a restaurant at the World's Fair, and, later, a NYC nightclub. Pauline eventually moved to Baltimore, where she and her husband operated a dyeing business. Charles, who was inside Ford’s when the president was shot, later worked as a clerk in the district. Anna and Julia never made it out of childhood. Another daughter was born in 1862, but she also died. On Jan. 13, 1863, four-year-old Anna Augusta Petersen died. Her one-year-old sister Caroline Augusta died the next day.

I no longer have my hand-drawn map of the Petersen's four floors, but the Petersen's rented every available inch while demand was high during the war years.

The English basement in the main house was probably used as a bedroom and a dining room. Petersen had a separate tailor shop on the west side of Eighth Street, not far from the house.


With the war ended and the American economy entering a slump, Petersen’s lucrative uniform business dried up. He slipped from proprietor of his own shop to cutter in other tailors’ shops. He took to going on drinking sprees once or twice a week. He died on June 18, 1871. The coroner’s inquest found he died of an “overdose of laudanum taken through mistake,” but the New York Times erroneously labeled it a suicide.
Exactly four months after William died, his wife Anna was also dead. She was buried on the same Wednesday she died. Her family never disclosed the circumstances of her death, and death certificates from that period were not preserved.

Hope this helps.

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And Loetar44, you are right. William and Jennie did live in Galveston before they moved to L.A.