Valesca Arens Becker (maiden name: Arens or Ahrens) was born in Prussia on April 18, 1810, and baptized in the town of Nieheim. She immigrated to the United States and met Samuel Becker, and the two married in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on August 31, 1851. Shortly thereafter, they moved to Europe and Samuel pursued a degree from the University of Göttingen, moving back to America in 1853 so that Samuel could begin his job as a professor of modern languages at the University of Virginia. While living in Charlottesville, they had their sole child, Valesca Becker, born May 8, 1854. The family moved to Hampton, Virginia, in 1856 after Samuel resigned from the University of Virginia to teach at the Chesapeake Female College. Upon Samuel's enlistment in the Marine Corps in 1858, Valesca probably went to live with Samuel’s brother, Thomas Becker, a Roman Catholic priest who lived in Martinsburg, Virginia, because she appears in the 1860 census in Thomas’s household with her daughter. After 1860, Valesca does not appear in any later records as living with Samuel Becker. It is uncertain when, where, and how she died.
| Name: | Becker, Valesca Arens | |||||||||
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| Gender: | F | |||||||||
| Race: | White | |||||||||
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| Birth date: | 1810-04-18 | |||||||||
| Birth date certainty: | Certain | |||||||||
| Birth place: | Prussia | |||||||||
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1860 U.S. Federal Census, accessed on Ancestry.com; Thomas Joseph Peterman, The Cutting Edge: The Life of Thomas Andrew Becker (Devon, PA: W.T. Cooke, 1982).
