CHAPTER I
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 April 2011
Summary
RECOLLECTIONS OF EARLY LIFE IN HANOVER.
Caroline Lucretia Herschel was born at Hanover on the 16th of March, 1750. She was the eighth child and fourth daughter of Isaac Herschel, by Anna Ilse Moritzen, to whom he was married in August, 1732. The family consisted of ten children, four of whom died in early childhood.
A memorandum in the handwriting of Isaac Herschel, transcribed by his daughter in the original German at the beginning of her Recollections, traces the family back to the early part of the seventeenth century, about which time, it appears that three brothers Herschel left Moravia on account of their religion (which was Protestant), and became possessors of land in Saxony. One of these brothers, Hans, was a brewer at Pirna, a little town two miles from Dresden, and the father of two sons, one of whom, Abraham by name, was born in 1651, was the father of the abovementioned Isaac, and the grandfather of Caroline Lucretia Herschel. Abraham Herschel was employed in the royal gardens at Dresden, he received commissions from various quarters on account of his taste and skill as a landscape gardener. Of his four children, Eusebius, the eldest, appears to have kept up little or no intercourse with his family after the father's death in 1718. The second child, Apollonia, married a landed proprietor, Herr von Thümer.
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- Memoir and Correspondence of Caroline Herschel , pp. 1 - 28Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010First published in: 1876
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