Catherine Alexander Duer
second daughter of Gen. William Alexander, the claimant of the Scottish earldom of Stirling
Catherine Alexander Duer (March 8, 1755 – July 26, 1826) was a society figure and political hostess in the early American republic.
Early life
Catherine Alexander was born in 1755, the daughter of General William Alexander and Sarah Livingston Alexander. Her father was called "Lord Stirling" (though his claim to the title was disputed) and she was sometimes known as "Lady Kitty". She was from a prominent New York family: her grandfathers were James Alexander, was a lawyer in colonial New York, and Philip Livingston. Her paternal grandmother was merchant Mary Alexander. Among her great-grandparents were Robert Livingston and Alida Schuyler, daughter of Philip Pieterse Schuyler.
Catherine Alexander's maternal uncles included Philip Livingston, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, William Livingston, first Governor of New Jersey, and Peter Van Brugh Livingston, first treasurer of New York State. One of her first cousins was Sarah Livingston Jay.
Society hostess and legacy
In 1779, George Washington attended the New Jersey wedding of Catherine Alexander and William Duer. Duer was a member of the Continental Congress, and a signer of the Articles of Confederation.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Catherine Alexander Duer” as second daughter of Gen. William Alexander, the claimant of the Scottish earldom of Stirling. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q20036554. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1755, 1826 and 1779.
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This entry incorporates text from “Catherine Alexander Duer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.