Mary Edwina Notestine Smith was born in 1871 in Augusta, Kalamazoo County, Michigan, the eldest daughter of Ithiel A. and Mary Elizabeth (Notestine) Smith. Ithiel had enlisted in the 23rd Regiment of the Ohio Infantry on New Year’s Day, 1862, and served with Company B of that regiment for the entirety of the Civil War. Ithiel and Mary were married in Allen County, Indiana in 1869; Mary had been first married in 1854 to Albert S. Ellsworth, but when Albert died in 1865, she was left a widow with three children. The youngest of her three sons, Eddie, also died in 1865, but when she and Ithiel were enumerated in the 1870 census, her two older sons, Benjamin and Charles Ellsworth, were living with them in Washington Township, Allen County, Indiana. Ithiel was a farmer. I do not know and can’t really imagine what the Smiths were doing in Michigan when their daughter Mary, my great-great-grandmother, was born. No other records place them in Michigan, and none of their parents or siblings ever lived there that I can tell. In 1880, Ithiel, Mary (the mother), Mary (the daughter), Charles Ellsworth and Willard and Lydia Smith (Mary’s siblings) were living in Decatur, Macon County, Illinois. Ithiel was a grocer there, and his stepson Charles was also employed by the grocery.
By the following autumn, the Smiths had returned to Indiana, where Mary’s mother Mary Elizabeth (Notestine) Smith died at the age of only forty-three years. Ithiel was married a second time in 1887 to Emma Jane Farding, nearly twenty years his junior. They had two more children, Nora in 1888 and Bessie in 1892. From her father and stepmother’s home, then, Mary was married in 1889 to Henry A. Wetzel, a native of Indiana. In both the 1890 and 1895-96 directories of Allen County, Indiana, Henry was listed as a resident of Saint Joseph Township. The 1900 census located Henry, Mary, their children Elmer, John Raymond and Nina May, and Henry’s mother Anna Maria (Pflaumer) Wetzel residing together in Saint Joseph Township. Henry was a farmer. In 1910, Henry, Mary (who had begun using the nickname “Mamie”), Elmer, John Raymond and Nina May were still living in Saint Joseph Township, and Henry was still farming. The 1920 census located Henry, Mamie, John Raymond, his wife Lois and their son Howard residing together in Saint Joseph Township, where Henry and John Raymond were farming together. In 1930, Henry, Mamie and two of their granddaughters, Mary and Evelyn Wetzel (Elmer’s daughters) were living in Washington Township, Allen County, Indiana, where Henry was then working as a carpenter and contractor. Henry, Mamie and their grandson Robert Wetzel (son of Elmer) lived at 302 Williams in Fort Wayne, Allen County, Indiana when the census was taken in 1930. Henry had retired and Mamie, aged 70, was housekeeping.
Henry died in 1941, at the age of seventy-five years. In 1950, Mamie was living with her grandson Robert Wetzel and his family at 427 West Butler in Fort Wayne, Allen County, Indiana. When Mamie passed away in 1958, at the age of eighty-seven years, her obituary told: “Mrs. Mary “Mamie” Wetzel…died…at the home of a daughter, Mrs. Mae Springer, 420 E. Main St., after a lengthy illness. …she lived in the Fort Wayne area for many years. She was the widow of Henry A. Wetzel, former Allen County commissioner, who died in 1941. Mrs. Wetzel was a charter member of the Ridge Road Club.” A significant amount of looking, including in the two-volume History of Fort Wayne and Allen County of 2005, did not yield any information on the Ridge Road Club. The Ridge Road was one of the first main roads through Allen County; today it is Indiana State Road 37, stretching diagonally from Fort Wayne north and east to Ohio. Mamie would have lived on or near it most of her life, until she moved into Fort Wayne as an elderly woman. According to Mamie’s death certificate, she died of valvular heart disease. Under “other significant conditions,” her physician wrote: “chronic lung condition – couldn’t get patient to have x-ray”. Mid-century, it is of note that no church membership was mentioned in either Mamie’s or Henry’s obituary. It is also worth noting, again, that aside from her club membership, the only descriptive information in Mamie’s obituary is about her husband.
Here are just some of the things Mamie lived through: When she was 10, her mother died. She likely helped to raise her brother William, four years her junior, and her sister Lydia, six years her junior. She attended school through the eighth grade, while also probably running her father’s household – as a “tween” and teen. When she was sixteen, her father remarried. When she was eighteen, she was married. When she was 20, 24 and 29, she gave birth to her three children. So again, she was raising children and running her husband’s household in her twenties and thirties. When she was 44, her father died. In the 1910s, Henry was fully involved with the county commission and so Mamie was likely doing a lot of farm work both in her home and out of it. She lived through the first World War, with two sons registered for the draft (though neither of them was drafted, she would not have known that until the end of the war). She attended her children’s weddings and welcomed twenty grandchildren. When she was seventy years old, and at the beginning of the second World War, her husband died. She moved – from the farm in Saint Joseph Township, where she had spent more than fifty years of her life, to Fort Wayne at 1120 East State Street, to 302 Williams, to 427 West Butler with her grandson, to her daughter’s home – and those were just the moves chronicled by her census records. She likely spent more than fifty years doing heavy housework, gardening, cooking, baking, canning, and probably a significant amount of that doing heavy farmwork alongside her father, brother, husband and sons. Then, near the end of her life, “lengthy illness” – heart disease and likely debilitating lung disease, while being passed from relative to relative depending on who had the resources and space to care for her in her old age. When she passed away, she was eighty-seven years old. None of her children lived as long as she did.
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