Elisabeth Peter

Life

1. 1802Born · Heiligenkreuz im Lafnitztal, Burgenland, Austria
2. 1850Died · Heiligenkreuz im Lafnitztal, Burgenland, Austria

Their story

Elisabeth Peter was the wife of the cottager Johann Zieger of Heiligenkreuz and the mother of his sons Johann (1824), Michael (1830) and Andreas (1833). The parish death register fixes her end: she died on 8 April 1850 at Heiligenkreuz, aged 48, which places her birth around 1802. (The entry oddly calls her "unmarried" — almost certainly a clerk's slip, since by then she had been Johann's widow for seventeen years and is recorded under his name, Zieger.) Her maiden name was Peter — written plainly "geborne Peter" at her son Johann's 1824 baptism, and carried by the feminine forms Peterin and Petrin afterward; she was not a Petermann, which was a separate parish family. But where she was born stays a mystery: no Elisabeth Peter is baptised in the Eltendorf parish in her birth window, and none of its Peter households quite fits. Like her husband, she seems to have come into Heiligenkreuz from elsewhere, and her parents are not yet known. She was widowed young: Johann died in January 1833, seven weeks before their last son was born, and she raised three boys through seventeen years of widowhood before her own death in 1850. Reconstructed from the Evangelical registers of Eltendorf (Matricula-Online), 2026.

Family