Catherine Gansevoort Douw

Catherine Gansevoort was born in May 1782. She was the daughter of Albany attorney Leonard Gansevoort, Jr. and his wife Maria Van Rensselaer Gansevoort. She grew up ias part of a very large family n her father's Market Street home and at Van Rensselaer farms in Greenbush as well.

In January 1811, Catherine was twenty-nine when she became the third wife of her fifty-two-year-old cousin Johannes De Peyster Douw. That marriage produced four children whom she raised along with those from Douw's previous marriages. Catherine seems to have spent considerable time at the Douw country seat across the Hudson at Wolvenhook where her father also lived for a time during the late 1790s. The family's biographer called her life there "exceedingly busy, practical, and normal."

John De Peyster Douw died in 1835. Catherine Gansevoort Douw died in April 1848 - months shy of her sixty-fourth birthday.

Sources: The life of Catherine Gansevoort Douw is CAP biography number 4682. This sketch is derived chiefly from family and community-based resources.