The Chicago Historical Society received a letter from a Chicago lawyer in 1925:

I shall shortly deliver to you the picture that was in the room in which
President Lincoln died and a bolster which was on the bed in which he lay...
They will come as a gift of Mrs. Charles E. Rector, widow of the hotel man of this city...

Charles Rector had two wives; his first wife was Louise Petersen.

Louise died several years before the bolster was donated to the Chicago Historical Society. The second Mrs. Rector knew that Louise was somehow related to William Petersen, who owned the boarding house where Lincoln died. The Chicago Historical Society had acquired Lincoln's Petersen house deathbed from Charles Gunther five years earlier. An 1871 affidavit in Gunther's files confirming the authenticity of the deathbed was signed by William Petersen's daughter, "Louise A. Petersen, Mrs. Charles E. Rector."

In the letter, D.S. Fraser of Vancouver, British Columbia, explained that he was married to Frances Rector Fraser, the daughter of Louise Petersen Rector. His account of the events at the Petersen's boarding house vary considerably from other published reports:

William Petersen... [was] at home at the time Lincoln was carried from the Ford's Theatre. Hearing a commotion in the street, William Petersen went out to learn that "a man had been shot," and directed the people to carry him into his house... The room to which Abraham Lincoln was carried after his assassination was the room shared by Louise Petersen and her sister, Pauline Petersen... After Lincoln had been removed from the house, some of the accessories in the room at the time of his death were divided up among members of the family, among them being the death-bed pillow now in the possession of my wife.

Borne by Loving Hands. Painting by eyewitness Carl Bersch, 1865. Courtesy of the Ford's Theatre National Historic Site, Washington, D.C.