I came across a couple of interesting facts yesterday, which is helping piece together how and when Ella Nora Howard and Charles Byron Keller came to get married. First of all, when I got the marriage certificate for Juliet Keller, the oldest of their children, it states that her birthplace is Lincoln, Nebraska. She was born in July of 1879; Ella and CB were married in October of 1878. Those dates are close enough together that I began to think maybe they got married in Nebraska. Then, when I was checking the family tree last night, a new fact "leaf" (one of Family Tree Maker's ways of telling you there is information online for this person) popped up on Ella, and guess what it was? The Nebraska state census in 1878, showing the entire Howard family living in Midland, Lancaster County, Nebraska! So there - I think - is the final piece pointing to the fact that Ella and CB were married in Nebraska, and that's why nothing shows up here in Morgan County records! So, I'll start working on that later tonight when I'm back from Peoria.
The other piece of information about these two has puzzled me for a while. The fact that at his death CB was living in Middletown suggests that he and Ella were at least separated, and I found it rather interesting that she didn't attend his funeral. Now I know that she remarried, for the 1910 census shows her married to Roland Butcher and living in Oklahoma City with Homer and Ray still at home, and Juliet and her husband and kids living with them. What I didn't look carefully at before was the column that asks for the number of years of present marriage. They had been married for 5 years in 1910, which means that she and CB were divorced, which led him to move to Middletown. Aha! I love solving puzzles!
Those were two of the items that kept bothering me yesterday, and now that I've had a chance to really look at them they are making sense. So I need to add divorce records to my list when I go back to Jacksonville. But, today it is on to Peoria (after a quick stop in Petersburg to check for CB's death certificate!) and continue the search for the elusive Gustav Winter, my dad's mother's father.
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