I have looked for years for the death date of my maternal Great-Grand-Aunt Lizzie, and found it just last night. THANK YOU, ANCESTRY DOT COM! This was a minor brick wall for me. No one I spoke to in the last 18 years knew what had happened to Aunt Lizzie in her dotage. Or where she had been buried. Our Great Aunt Helen told me she thought Lizzie had died/buried in Missouri. My Dear Old Mom (are you reading this, LOL!) spoke fondly of how her Aunt Lizzie was a lot of fun and quite energetic when she (as a child) last saw her some time in the 1940s. She recalls how Lizzie played with her younger sister Nancy.
When Elizabeth was born December 1, 1873 in Versailles, Missouri, her father, John Hanna Coffee, was 21. Her mother, Nancy (James) Coffee, was 19. By the time of the 1880 Federal Census, the family had moved to Cooke County, near Sherman, Texas. Lizzie is seven years old, and her little brother, John Willis Coffee, is five. I know of no other siblings. Why did this family move hundreds of miles from their central Missouri roots? A new railroad had just connected Missouri to Texas. The MKT or "Katy" railway went through Indian Territory, and my father's Ackley relatives once worked on building this same railroad outside of Tulsa. I can only imagine that Lizzie's parents took the Katy north and south a few times rather than risk riding a wagon through a very untamed Cherokee Nation. Think True Grit here. Lizzie had a two or three ex-Confederate soldier uncles who also settled in northern Texas, so this young Coffee family would have lived near "kin" at their Sherman, Texas home.
By 1894 the family is back in Morgan County, Missouri where Lizzie's mom, Nancy Coffee, dies in early August, at age 40. Her obit doesn't mention a cause of death. Perhaps the family returned to Missouri because Nancy was ill and wanted to be near family? I can only imagine her husband and two children were devastated. I have seen a transcription of an obit from a cousin-researcher who indicated it had been published in a local paper in 1894. Her tombstone, however, has an 1895 death date. Nancy had plenty of siblings. I hope someday to connect with a researcher descendant of this James family who might have a letter or family Bible indicating a cause of death. While Missouri has a great vital records' web presence via its Secretary of State, I don't yet find a death certificate for her--if one even exists.
Soon after, in April of 1897, a 23 year old Lizzie marries a 58 year old widower, Jerome Page. Jerome already has six children (the youngest, age six) and Lizzie bears him another three: Monta Belle, five months later; Albert, in 1900; and Roy in 1902. Successive censuses find Lizzie living in rural Morgan County up until she appears as "widowed" in the 1940 Census, living with her daughter's family.
This is the last I find of Aunt Lizzie until her death in Los Angeles on December 5, 1953--four days after her 80th birthday. Have you memories of her or recall stories told to you about John Willis Coffee's big sister, Elizabeth (Coffee) Page? Please share