Story: Finding Elizabeth Tanner...

Tonight I was going through cemetery records from Stamford CT. They are posted online, and there are many of them, and while I was on duty on the floor I scrolled through them. (It was a quiet night.)

I was looking through maybe the 20th cemetery on the list, scrolling as fast as I could read until I saw a family name. At that point I would stop and assess it. When I saw 'Tanner' I did the same thing, and that's how I saw Elizabeth.

Ida May Tanner (granddaughter of Elizabeth) married Christopher Joseph Adams in 1905, to give a point of reference.

Elizabeth's story is quite interesting, but for tonight I am just going to tell you about this discovery.

The inscription read: Elizabeth Tanner d 26 Jan 1880 at age 73. That's it. 

But then I saw next to her the inscription for Charles W Tanner. That was her husband, well-known from previous discoveries.

The problem was that he was listed as having died in 1831. Charles was only a few years old then. 

That was a copying error. I know that because about a month ago I found that Charles Wilcox Tanner, born Calne Wiltshire (England), died in February 1881. (This was where Elizabeth's husband Charles Wilcox Tanner was known to be born, so there's no question it was he.) I can easily see how the 8 and 3 were confused on an aging tombstone.

At the time that I found Charles Wilcox Tanner's death record in the Greenwich CT vital records, on a microfilm, there was no sign of Elizabeth.

I hadn't known they were in Greenwich, and when I first found Charles I had no way of knowing that Elizabeth had lived with him there. She could have died much earlier and perhaps he had moved since.

Elizabeth was at least 15, maybe 18 years older than Charles when they married: he was 19 or 20, she was a widow with 5 children, both living in Calne.

So the idea that she might have predeceased him by many years was perfectly reasonable. I just didn't know.

But now I do. Charles died a year after Elizabeth. He was still a young man, 53 or 54 years old. And they both died in...

Well, that was another puzzle. I was looking at Stamford cemeteries, and Charles Wilcox Tanner died in Greenwich. However, a quick Google search let me know that Roxbury, where the cemetery was, was very close to Stamford but in Greenwich.

So now the final chapter is written about Elizabeth, and I am delighted to have stumbled upon this fact tonight.