Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Where Did Will Go After 1903?

Where was Will between November 1903, when he left my great-grandmother with a three year-old boy and about to deliver a baby (my grandmother) in god-forsaken Roswell, New Mexico Territory (I have been to Roswell; I know whereof I speak), and November 1956, when he died without any family present in a V.A. hospital in Dallas, Texas?

I found a William D. Stewart in Sabine Parish, Louisiana in the 1920 Census.  This Stewart was the right age, and he had a wife named Emma about 9 or 10 years younger.  (Fannie was 9 or 10 years younger than Will.)  However, William and Emma Stewart were also enumerated in the 1910 Census in Sabine Parish, Louisiana, with a 15 year-old son, Lamont.  Could Will have been married to Emma in the early 1890s, had a son about 1895, then gone to Denison, married Fanny, had a family, and then returned by 1910 to his first family?

Of course he could have, although that seems to assume quite a bit.  The Sabine Parish William Stewart was a farmer in 1910 and in 1920.  While Will was described as an "agriculturalist" in the puff-piece about his father, nothing about Will's life between 1898 and 1903 suggests he was remotely interested in farming at that point.  Further, Will certainly did not stay in one place very long during that period of time.  I believe the Sabine Parish William Stewart was not the Will Stewart of my family.

Bolstering this conclusion is the fact that his niece's son reported in 1995 that Will never married.  Had Will been married before he left Louisiana (even though in a different parish), his family probably would have known that.  Will must have never told anyone in his family about Fannie, Ernest or Mabel.  I assume a serious rift between Will and the rest of his family which never healed.  And right now, there is a gap of 53 years of total mystery.

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