Monday, October 6, 2014

Monday is for Mothers

The young woman in this heavily retouched portrait is my maternal great great grandmother Elizabeth Taylor* who was born in Ohio, possibly Cincinnati, around 1845.

By 1856 she and her family had moved to Washington County, Iowa, where she married George Marion Tomlinson on Christmas Eve in 1860.

Her only child, my grandmother Rufina Ellen Tomlinson, was born on 13 January 1863 and that's the last indisputable fact we have about Elizabeth.

When George Tomlinson registered for the draft in July of 1863 he is listed as married so we can infer that his wife was still living. He married again in 1866 and didn't move to Colorado (where this photograph was done) until sometime after 1885.

Everything we know about Elizabeth comes from two U.S. Censuses (1850 and 1860), one Iowa State Census (1856) and her marriage record. She probably died before her 21st birthday and we've had no luck finding a death or burial record for her.

So you can imagine how exciting it was to find this portrait of her!

*Which of course makes her my daughter Christine's 3x great grandmother.

Photograph courtesy of Olive Kennedy.

© 2014 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

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