Civil War - Civil Union:
Chapter 5: Belle M. (Elderkin) Gilbert (1878 - 1941) |
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Homepage Civil War-Civil Union Introduction Prologue: 1600s-1842 Chapter 1: 1842-1862 Chapter 2: 1862-1863 Chapter 3: 1863-1882 Chapter 4: 1883-1912 Chapter 5: 1912-on Conclusion Bibliography Descendancy Chart (to come) For Questions or
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Belle was Mary and David�s youngest daughter. She, like her brother Amos, probably never remembered a time when her father was healthy. But she remained in Cedar Falls until she was 23 or 24, attending school and becoming a bookkeeper.[i] By 1902, however, she too had headed for Montana. She boarded with her siblings Silas and Lulu,[ii] and became a stenographer at Lewis Dry Goods where her brother in-law, Robert Setzer, worked.[iii] When he left Lewis Dry Goods for the larger Hennessy�s Mercantile, Belle followed. She was first a stenographer and later a clerk there.[iv] Despite her good job, Belle was somewhat nomadic. She changed boarding houses each year,[v] and she took trips. She visited Iowa for Christmas in 1905[vi] and attended her brother Amos� wedding in 1908.[vii] In about 1914, she left Montana for Northern California[viii] � rather than Los Angeles like her siblings. Belle had not married, however. In 1920, she was a laborer on a ranch in Sacramento.[ix] By 1927, she was a 49-year old spinster, who had been working her whole life. Around that time she met Orville Gilbert, a butcher, who was twelve years her junior.[x] Did she fall deeply in love with the younger man? Was she desperate to leave her life of labor behind? Whatever the case, Belle Elderkin misled the man she would marry. She chopped fourteen years off of her age, claiming she was just 35.[xi] Orville and Belle moved to a farm in Lake County, California, where she took care of his two children, George who was then 12, and Arthur who was seven.[xii] She may have retained her youthful glow to the end, because Orville either never caught on or chose to play along with her story. When she came down with cancer, he took her to Long Beach where she died just five days short of her 63rd birthday on May 26, 1941.[xiii] Orville wrote out her birth date as May 31, 1891 (it was really 1878), which would have made her 49 years old, the age Belle was when she married Orville 14 years before.
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5
[i]
1900 U.S. census, Cedar Falls, Black Hawk County, Iowa, population
schedule, sheet 27B, lines 66-71.
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