Her father was a military musician and tried to provide her, and all his children, with an education. Her mother did not see the need for a girl to become educated. She thought LIna should work as a maid for the family. Because the diseases had made her not look like other girls, her family thaought she would never get married.
In 1757, her brother, William moved to England to get away from the Seven Years War. He became organist and choir master at the Octagon Chapel. Fifteen years later, when she was 22, he asked Caroline come work as his housekeeper.
William was also a great astronomer. On March 13, 1781, he saw what he first thought was a comet. Later, everyone found out he had found a new planet, Uranus. At this same time, Caroline was helping him keep his records.
Because William traveled a lot, sometimes Caroline could look at the night sky, herself. In 1783 she discovered three new nebulae (nebulae are hazy clouds where stars form). Today, these objects are know as NGC 2360, NGC 205, and NGC 253. On August 1, 1786, Caroline discovered her first comet. This was the first discovery of a comet by a woman.
By the year 1797 Caroline had discovered seven more comets. Besides her comet hunting, Caroline also began re-wrote the star catalog of John Flamsteed and included another 560 stars which Flamsteed had left out. After her brother William died in 1822, Caroline returned to Hannover and finished William's catalogue of 2500 nebulae.
Caroline won a lot of awards for her work, like the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Gold Medal for Science by the King of Prussia in 1846 on her 96th birthday.
She died on January 9, 1848. Before she died, she wrote what she wanted on her tombstone: "The eyes of her who is glorified here below turned to the starry heavens." In 1889, a minor planet was named "Lucretia," Caroline's middle name.
