Finding Isabelle

Sometime in the 1980s I stumbled on a mystery named Isabelle.

I was checking out the 1900 census record looking for my grandmother Ida May Tanner, I found her listed as the daughter, age 14, of Mary Jane Tanner. The record also included another daughter, Isabelle, age 12.

So I asked my mother who Isabelle was. Ida was my mother's mother-in-law, and my mother had known her. If she'd had a sister, my mother felt she would have known about it. But my mother had never heard of Isabelle, and questioned whether she could really be Ida's sister.

In all the questioning of my father about his family that I did as a child, he had never mentioned an Isabelle, either.

So for years I wondered who she was. The 1910 census record had entries for Mary Jane Tanner, head of household, age 50, widowed, Ida May Tanner 14 - daughter, and Isabelle Tanner 12 - daughter. Some boarders were also mentioned. It also noted that Mary Jane was renting this house, in Norwalk CT.

More recently I had returned to that record and again mulled over the fate of Isabelle. The only conclusion I could draw was that she had died sometime after 1900.

Then a few weeks ago we went to the temple and I did the work for Mary Jane, whose name before she was married was Reynolds.

(I am not saying it was her maiden name. We have evidence that she had been married previously and don't know if Reynolds was possibly her earlier married name.)

In any case, I did the work for Mary Jane Reynolds, and from that moment on it became easy to piece together Isabelle's existence. Maybe her mom wanted her found.

When we got back from that long day at the temple and the 200-mile round-trip, I walked into the house and straight to the computer. I had a general desire to find Isabelle, and just wanted to give it a stab.

I always seem to gain a little something when I revisit old sources, so I went to the 1910 census, sure I had checked there before, but - why not give it another shot?

What I saw was a little surprising and made me think maybe I hadn't seen it earlier. There, in the same house as 10 years earlier, was Mary Jane, her daughter Ida (now Adams), her son-in-law Chris Adams, and her grandson Christopher A Adams, age 18 mos. What a thrill! I was peeking into the home of my father when he was a toddler! As usual, Mary Jane also had a couple of boarders that were listed as members of the household.

No Isabelle! I concluded she must certainly have died sometime in the previous decade, though of course she could be married and not living there any longer.

I tried to find a death record for her. The death records are fairly incomplete on Ancestry.com, and I found nothing.

So I went back to the 1910 census, looking for those little clues. Mary Jane was still the head-of-household, still renting, still boarding...

I looked at the boarders, this time a couple. John Gilbert (interesting name for me - I know someone named John Gilbert), his wife Belle, his daughters Ida May Gilbert and Marion Gilbert...

HOLD ON! The boarders named their daughter after the daughter of their landlord? Dubious...maybe John was a relative of some sort?

Then it dawned on me. The wife, Belle, was Isabelle.

It was so thrilling! She hadn't died! She was there, married, living with her mom, her husband, and her two little girls, ages 3 and 1. Isabelle herself was now 22, so she had probably married at 18.

So I immediately went to the 1920 census to see if they were still living there. Mary Jane was, and so were Ida and her family. But John and Isabelle and daughters weren't.

What I did find is another story for another day.