section_path: Biography/Family
section_name: Family
paragraph_text: Family
  
  Gauss married Johanna Osthoff on 9 October 1805 in St. Catherine's church in Brunswick. They had two sons and one daughter: Joseph (1806–1873), Wilhelmina (1808–1840), and Louis (1809–1810). Johanna died on 11 October 1809, one month after the birth of Louis, who himself died a few months later. Gauss chose the first names of his children in honour of Giuseppe Piazzi, Wilhelm Olbers, and Karl Ludwig Harding, the discoverers of the first asteroids.
  
  On 4 August 1810, the widower married Wilhelmine (Minna) Waldeck, a friend of his first wife, with whom he had three more children: Eugen (later Eugene) (1811–1896), Wilhelm (later William) (1813–1879), and Therese (1816–1864). Minna Gauss died on 12 September 1831 after being seriously ill for more than a decade. Therese then took over the household and cared for Gauss for the rest of his life; after her father's death, she married actor Constantin Staufenau. Her sister Wilhelmina married the orientalist Heinrich Ewald. Gauss's mother Dorothea lived in his house from 1817 until she died in 1839.
  
  The eldest son Joseph, while still a schoolboy, helped his father as an assistant during the survey campaign in the summer of 1821. After a short time at university, in 1824 Joseph joined the Hanoverian army and assisted in surveying again in 1829. In the 1830s he was responsible for the enlargement of the survey network to the western parts of the kingdom. With his geodetical qualifications, he left the service and engaged in the construction of the railway network as director of the Royal Hanoverian State Railways. In 1836 he studied the railroad system in the US for some months.
  
  Eugen left Göttingen in September 1830 and emigrated to the United States, where he joined the army for five years. He then worked for the American Fur Company in the Midwest. Later, he moved to Missouri and became a successful businessman. Wilhelm married a niece of the astronomer Bessel; he then moved to Missouri, started as a farmer and became wealthy in the shoe business in St. Louis in later years. Eugene and William have numerous descendants in America, but the Gauss descendants left in Germany all derive from Joseph, as the daughters had no children.