(Dover, DE) On Saturday, April 2, at 10:30 a.m. author Kathryn Canavan will present a program at the Delaware Public Archives about the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Focusing on the assassination from the perspective of the Petersen family, Canavan will show how this Washington D.C. family became caught up in the tragedy. The Petersens and their fascinating boarders lived directly across the street from Ford’s Theatre. They were aware of information that government officials such as Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and the Metropolitan Police were not. Just weeks before the assassination, John Wilkes Booth had sat on the same bed where President Lincoln eventually struggled for his life. They were ordinary people caught up in an extraordinary event – the nation’s first presidential assassination.

Kathy Canavan is a freelance reporter whose work has appeared in USA Today, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The News Journal, Prevention Magazine and the AARP Bulletin. She was a 2011 National Health Journalism Fellow at the University of Southern California. Ms. Canavan began researching the unintended consequences of the Lincoln Assassination in 2009. Her book, Lincoln’s Final Hours, Terror, Conspiracy and the Assassination of America’s Greatest President, uncovers new information about what else was happening inside Petersen’s Boardinghouse on the night President Lincoln died there.

The program is free to the public and will last approximately one hour. No reservations are required. For more information, contact Tom Summers (302) 744-5047 or e-mail
thomas.summers@delaware.gov.

The Delaware Public Archives is located at 121 Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard North in Dover. The Mabel Lloyd Ridgely Research Room is open to the public Monday – Friday from 8 a.m. to 4:15 p.m. On the second Saturday of every month the research room is open from 9 a.m. to 4:15 p.m.