According to the Richmond Theater Fire Victims List (https://www.theaterfirebook.com/): "Anne Margaretta Anderson was born around 1799, the daughter of boarding school headmaster Leroy Anderson and the late Nancy Shields. (Leroy would remarry Hannah Wright Southgate in 1812; her brother William was a Theater fire victim.) For more information on Anderson family history see the William and Mary College Quarterly, vol. 13 (1903-2). A moving series of letters between Matthew Clay and Leroy Anderson after the fire is also published in the Richmond Enquirer 1/11/1812. Therein Anderson indicates his daughter was identified by a locket around her neck. Instead of a private burial, he chose to have her interred with her friends in the mass grave, still wearing her locket. In a letter to William Temple of the Burial Committee, Anderson wrote, "No, my dear friend, I have no wish to separate the remains of my beloved child from those of the amiable and dear companions, in whose embrace, perhaps, she died. Side by side they sunk, together their immortal spirits took flight, and it is even a sort of melancholy satisfaction, that their dust will mingle in one common tomb, social even in death."
According to the Richmond Theater Fire Victims List (https://www.theaterfirebook.com/): "Anne Margaretta Anderson was born around 1799, the daughter of boarding school headmaster Leroy Anderson and the late Nancy Shields. (Leroy would remarry Hannah Wright Southgate in 1812; her brother William was a Theater fire victim.) For more information on Anderson family history see the William and Mary College Quarterly, vol. 13 (1903-2). A moving series of letters between Matthew Clay and Leroy Anderson after the fire is also published in the Richmond Enquirer 1/11/1812. Therein Anderson indicates his daughter was identified by a locket around her neck. Instead of a private burial, he chose to have her interred with her friends in the mass grave, still wearing her locket. In a letter to William Temple of the Burial Committee, Anderson wrote, "No, my dear friend, I have no wish to separate the remains of my beloved child from those of the amiable and dear companions, in whose embrace, perhaps, she died. Side by side they sunk, together their immortal spirits took flight, and it is even a sort of melancholy satisfaction, that their dust will mingle in one common tomb, social even in death."
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