Barker I mentioned that she'd been left with children when my
great grandfather Frank W Barker died in 1905 and that one of
them, Henry Lee Barker, was 15 years old. The problem was that
Frank and Lottie had married in 1898.
So who was Henry's birthmother? I'd only just found the image for
Frank and Lottie's marriage in New Hampshire and it told me that
Frank had been widowed at the time he married Lottie. But I couldn't
find a record for his first marriage anywhere online. So I turned to
Henry Lee's records.I found the image for his marriage to Marian Rich
on 13Dec 1917:
On the back where the parents of the wedding couple are given I found
my answer: Henry's mother was named Cora DeMerritt. Now that I had
a name I tried to find a record of Frank and Cora's marriage but didn't
find it. However, I did find the website for the Mt Will Cemetery in
Bethel Maine and Cora's information is there. She died on 16May 1891,
nearly a month after giving birth to Henry, so complications from the
birth might have caused her death.
She is buried near her parents and her brother Charles Owen DeMerritt.
Charles' wife was Lucy Barker, Frank Barker's sister.
2 comments:
In the late 1890s C. Owen Demeritt was engineer at the spool mill in Locke Mills (Greenwood), where I grew up. In fact, he and Lucy rented the house where I grew up. Their daughter Cora was born in Greenwood in 1899, probably in the same house.
So far I've found five or six children likely to have been born in the house. And perhaps five people who died there, which explains the creaking floorboards at night.
Chris, if that's the house in Newry, Henry lived there as well for a time. He's on the 1910 Federal Census at age 19 living with C.Owen and Lucy and children, including Cora DeMerritt.
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