June 2017

It's been a slow month (in June) for genealogy for me.  Not for any lack of trying, but just nothing really coming up.  I have been keeping up with the Ancestry.com hints.  I have been trying again to find some information on my husband's grandfather's first wife, and thought I had a lead, but it didn't pan out.  I'm feeling pretty stuck with trying to find what became of this woman. I need to go over what few pieces of information that I have and see what is missing.

Estella Mabel Colwell was born around 1905 in Illinois to Charles Reuben  and Rhoda Rose Patterson Colwell.  Her brother Charles Edward Colwell was born in 1907 in Wyoming, Stark County, Illinois.  (She also had a sister Jennie who was born in August of 1902 in Illinois.  According to Find A Grave, Jennie died in December of 1905. However, she is listed in the 1910 Census as age 7, living with her parents and siblings.  But, the census also shows that her mother had 3 children with 2 living)

In 1910, Estella Mabel Colwell was listed in the Steuben, Marshall County, Illinois Census as "Mabel", age 5. She was listed as living with her parents, her sister Jennie and her brother Edward.  Her father was listed as a coal miner.

Mabel's parents divorced sometime before 1917, when her mother was listed as being married to Raymond Angelo Bice and living in Elmira, New York.  Mabel was twelve years old in 1917.  In the following year, Mabel's father died in Sparland, Marshall County, Illinois in October (1918). Mabel married George Leo Moreland in April 1919 in Lacon, Marshall County, Illinois.  She was fourteen years old when she married, and George was twenty-two years old.  Mabel's mother consented to the marriage.  George was in the service at the time of the marriage.

Mabel is listed in the 1920 Lacon, Marshall County, Illinois Census, with George, listed as age 22 and Mabel listed as age 15.  George worked as a Teamster and his father William lived next door to them.  Mabel's mother and brother Charles are listed as living in New York in 1920.

And there the records I have found pretty much end.  George Moreland married again in 1925 in Granville, Putnam County, Illinois.  So he and Mabel divorced between 1920 and 1925. I did find a record of Mabel's grand-uncle's probate from 1932 and it stated that the court had been unable to locate Mabel.

Both Mabel's brother and her mother's obituaries do not list her.  Her mother died in 1960 in New York and her brother Charles died in New York in 1976.

The only other clue that I have is that my husband's mother remembered her mother and father sometimes arguing over someone named "Mabel". Since my mother-in-law was not born until 1929, she would have had to have been old enough to remember their arguments about Mabel.

I think that I will retry my efforts over finding a copy of George and Mabel's divorce, but other than that, I don't have many ideas for searching.  I will try Newspapers.com again and see if that results in anything.