Jordan, Mortimer H. Wooster, L. Birmingham: Birmingham Printing Company. Birmingham Public Library Press. Rudd, Steven July 1, City madam finally gets honor she's due. The Birmingham News - accessed July 5, Many accounts of Louise Wooster's life varies, as she gave several different reports of her life in both her autobiography published in and in various news reports of the time.
No known photographs or portraits of her survive. They were married in Tuscaloosa in , where Lou was believed to have been born. William Wooster died in while the family was living in Mobile, leaving Mary a widow with seven children to care for.
She eventually remarried to a man named John Williams. Lou would subsequently blame him for squandering the family money. In , Wooster accounted in her autobiography that her second eldest sister, Margaret, left home and became a prostitute at the age of 14, thus shaming the family name henceforth. After several failed marriages, Margaret later owned a brothel a block over from Wooster's in Birmingham, on 3rd Avenue North, under the name "Maggie Bracken.
Not long after Margaret's "fall," two of Lou's older sisters and her mother, Mary, died. Before her death, Mary charged Lou to take care of her two youngest sisters - Julia and Cornelia. These younger sisters were placed in Mobile's Protestant Orphan Asylum on March 16, , against their deceased mother's wishes and the day after her funeral. Lou went to live with her eldest sister, Frances, who was married to a Mr. Van Buren and currently living in New Orleans with another of her older sisters, Jennie.
Frustrated with Van Buren's refusal to take her youngest sisters out of the orphanage, Lou took a ship back to Mobile and forged a letter in Frances' hand, claiming inability to retrieve the girls due to illness, and asked that they be received into Louise Wooster's care.
