Effie and Ellsworth

Gotta love those old fashioned names. My very interesting great grandmother, Effie, did apparently marry a younger guy named Ellsworth. From what I can find, he may have also been known by his middle name, Elmer. I'm not sure when they married, but they are listed as such on the 1920 census. Of course, later that year (after the census) my great grandparents, George and Effie, were divorced. I just love the mysteries of my family.

In my search for Lola, my grandmother, I will try just about anything, so I decided to order Ellsworth's death certificate from the state of Illinois. He outlived Effie by three years. She died in 1931 and he died in 1934. Obviously, Effie wasn't going to be the informant on this, but I had a hope that maybe his daughter, Georgia, was. You see, according to Effie's obituary, one of her survivors was a daughter "Georgia". This was in addition to other children survivors, Lola, Bessie, Wells (Bill). Interesting fact is that Wells (Bill) wasn't actually mentioned as a survivor, but rather his wife was. Her other son, George, was not mentioned in the obituary.

Georgia was not the informant on Ellsworth's death certificate. It was his brother Albert, who died in 1940. Ugh. I spent a good portion of today trying to search for Georgia, but just haven't been able to find her yet, as far as I can tell. I did find three newspaper articles from Decatur (newspaperarchive.com) and one was an announcement from 1920 about the birth of a daughter for Elmer and his wife. Could that be Georgia?

The thing that doesn't quite make sense is that in 1920 Effie and Ellsworth were living as husband and wife according to the Census. Ellsworth doesn't have what I consider a common name, but could there have been another Elmer with the same last name in the same town that became a father? Who knows. Effie did have an interesting life. I don't believe she was the mother of Georgia, but haven't even looked into that only because I don't believe she was. I just can't imagine that she would have had a child at 50 back in the 1920s. That seems to be more of a modern day thing.

I do believe is that Effie and Ellsworth (Elmer) did share a love of booze. Both had on their death certificates cirrhosis of the liver as either a cause or contributing cause of death. I really need to make that trip to Illinois to do better research.