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| The Mystery of Hattie Miller SOLVED |
Hattie was the second youngest of nine children of Ira Miller and Lucy Owens. She waited some time to marry (an elderly 22), however, and married a rather unconventional choice in husband on 09 May 1916 - a widower and father of two grown daughters, Charles Henry Babcock, a farmer in Harrison, Benton County, Iowa. Charles was 60 at the time of his marriage to the young Hattie. How they met and got together I don't know. I bet it put his daughters into a tizz.
They had one daughter, Susie Josephine Babcock, before Charles died in 1930 at age 77. She married (1) Ralph Theodore Smith and (2) Earl W Amos.
Tracking Hattie after this became very difficult. The 1930 Census was the last sight of her in easily located records via Ancestry.com. The only thing I could imagine is that she married again, because she was a rather young woman when widowed.
After fully tracking her daughter through her two marriages, the answer was found not in records, but in the newspaper. A brief article mentioning her daughter, Mrs Earl Amos, as a survivor was the key. This was Hattie's obit! She had, it turned out, spent from at least 1940 until 1957 the sweetheart/mistress/ shack-up honey of Roy Bushnell. Roy, too, had been married before and that union ended in divorce prior to 1940.
Finally, something compelled Roy to marry Hattie, who was eight years older than him, on New Year's Eve, 1957. They lived in Vinton until Hattie died in 1963. Roy, who apparently liked the long-term dating model, then took up with Mrs Vera Talmadge, who he squired about from about 1965 into the 1970s. He died at 87 in 1987.
A string of children litter this story - the children of Charles, the children of Roy, the children of Earl, Susie's second husband, their children, and the children of Susie - only a couple of whom were raised by both of their parents.
Another mystery solved by putting the pieces together backwards.
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