Sister Mabel Mae Scott Facts and more

Mabel Mae Scott, my great-grandmother Leta's eldest sister, is a still a bit of a puzzle, partly because she left the family so early in her life and partly because according to the records I’ve uncovered she was born only three months after their brother Aaron. She moved far away (from northwest Ohio to Vancouver British Columbia) and then returned to the family’s lives more than three decades later. Some of the information is contradictory, and some of it still missing.

This is what I’ve uncovered:

• Mabel Mae Scott was born May 3, 1882, the daughter of David Scott. This information is according to her death certificate. I do not have a birth registration. There is no mother listed in the death certificate. Her brother Aaron was born on March 26, 1882. Both of his parents (Julia Snyder Scott and David Scott) are listed.
• In 1896, David and Julia Scott were divorced.
• In the 1900 census, Julia Scott was the head of household that included her son Aaron (age 18), and daughters Nellie (12), Louise (10) and Leta (6). If she had lived with them, Mabel would have also been 18 years old.
• In 1900, Floyd Worthing, the man Mabel who would become Mabel’s husband, was married to Alice May Dodge and living in Minnesota with her and their two children, Aimee (age 3) and Arnold (age 6 months).
• On May 27, 1901, Floyd Worthing acquired 160 acres in the Crookston area of Minnesota (near North Dakota).
• The 1921 Canada census shares that Mabel, Floyd and his son Arnold emigrated in 1904.
• Mabel’s sister Leta married Robert Fields on September 17, 1937.
• The Toledo Blade published a story shortly before Labor Day in a year after Leta was married to Bob Fields (her last name in the article) that Mabel was reunited with four of her siblings (Aaron, Nellie, Louise and Leta) in Toledo after a 33-year separation. I have an original and two copies of the article, but the date of publication is not included. Online archives do not go back this far for me to look up at this time. I will need to go to the Main Branch of the Lucas County, Ohio (in Toledo) public library to look at the newspaper archives when next I am in that area.
• Leta has a little bookmark in her Bible from Mabel that says she received it in St. Petersburg, Florida in February 1954.
• Floyd Worthing died in Vancouver on May 4, 1954.

From this information, I can make several reasonable suppositions:

• Mabel, along with her father David and brother Fred (who was younger) left the Scott household before 1900.
• After 1900 and before 1904, Mabel married Floyd Worthing. I have not uncovered any records of Floyd’s first wife (Alice) or their daughter after the 1900 census.
• The 33 years that the siblings had not seen each other was inaccurate. They had not seen each other for at last 35 years. If the reunion took place in August/September of the year after Leta married Fields, then this would have been 1938, and Mabel would have been 56 years old. If this was 33 years after she left, this means she left in 1905, when she was 23 years old. However, she was in Canada in 1905.

This leaves me with some questions:

• If Mabel’s birth date really was May 3, 1882, then who was her birth mother?
• Where was Mabel in 1900?
• What happened in her life between the time she left her parents’ home and married Floyd Worthing?
• Where and when did she meet and marry Floyd Worthing? If this happened in Minnesota, then how did she get there? Why did she go there?
• What happened to Floyd’s first wife and daughter?
• Did Mabel break off all contact with her family or did she stay in touch over the years?

While I will continue to research this information as I write, what I have certainly does give me ample opportunity to fill in the blanks. And this is why I am a bit relieved that I am writing a fictional biography. While the facts are helpful, the story is a literary representation of my great-grandmother’s life.

And, yes, I am taking into account that dates get confused, people do not always share all the facts, and truth is sometimes harder to ascertain than one imagines.