The Marriages of Eula Ledbetter (b. 1891) of Prattville, Alabama
Alabama seems a little outside the scope of my usual genealogy work, but Miss Eula married into the Lincoln tree I’m working on and caused me quite some trouble. You see, we either have a black widow or an extremely unlucky young lady running from the consequences of marrying the wrong person too young and attempting to protect her daughter.
I’m mostly sharing this with you to document it because the work was a lot of manual newspaper searches and I don’t want this delicate web I’ve managed to weave to get lost - if you have Eula or her daughter in your tree and have insight, my inbox is open.
I originally started looking for Eula because of Fred Ernest Colburn (b. 1886), son of Frederick Lincoln Colburn and Stella Brown. I couldn’t figure out what happened to Ernest when he was no longer living with his parents in Webster, Massachusetts, in 1920. He seemed to have disappeared. Then I found him in New York City, where his marriage record gives his birthplace.
In 1918, the marriage license for “Fred E. Coleburn” born in Webster, Massachusetts, lists the bride as “Eula L. Edmonds”.
So I tried to trace his wife and she was associated with a number of names, creating a very confusing but interesting web.
Who was Eula L. Edmonds?
Mrs. Eula Colburn (if she ever even used that name) was Eula (Ledbetter) Shores Edmonds before she married Ernest. A marriage announcement in 1912 (which I later confirmed was from the town her parents lived in) gives Eula’s maiden name and notes a first marriage in addition to the one being announced.
I was then able to find the first marriage registration - she had only been about 15 years old (I couldn’t find the Edmonds marriage registration for more information because the county is not included in the currently available online records).
Eula was born in Alabama in December 1891 according to the 1900 U.S. Census.
Her parents were William Ledbetter and Margaret Browning (d. 1942, Tuscaloosa), who had married in Autauga Co., Alabama, in 1872. Eula was the 7th of 8 children her mother claimed to have had on that census (of which 6 were still living at home).
In 1913, the newspaper notes that Mrs. Eula Edmonds and her daughter Margaret of Enterprise visited Eula’s sister Mrs. V. A. Spenny in Prattville (Sallie Ledbetter married Virgil A. Spenny in Prattville in 1892).
Based on a legal notice against minor Margaret Shores, daughter of “Mrs. Eula Edmond Shores”, in The Prattville Progress (Prattville, Alabama) November 18, 1920, Eula and her daughter were thought be living in California at that time. Apparently it involved her late husband’s family regarding their daughter, with at least two of his siblings as fellow defendants. Her late husband didn’t actually die until 1918 in El Paso, Texas. He’s buried in Forest Hill Cemetery, Birmingham, where the marriage notice in 1912 said they had lived (his will names his daughter and his mother’s sister).
So what is going on here?
Eula’s Husbands
So far, this appears to be what I have for Eula’s marriages:
James Franklin “Frank” Shores, October 24, 1906, Prattville, Alabama
E.W. Edmonds, August 1912, Enterprise, Alabama
Fred Ernest Colburn, December 18, 1918, New York City
I tried to determine what happened to each husband, hoping someone’s obituary would give clues like the marriage announcement did.
Despite the claims in the newspaper that Eula was a widow in 1912, she was not. According to other human interest pieces, she had been in Enterprise since about 1910, around the time she had her daughter. The marriage announcement from 1912 suggests that they were hiding the wedding at the judge’s house for some reason - what that reason is we may never know, but the usual suspects would be my guess (abuse, husband ran off, lies to cover divorce, etc.). So was she also not a widow in 1918? New York was a long way from home. How did she get there? But California was also a long way, and this was the same time period when my grandmother’s parents moved between Iowa and Florida and back, so I know it’s possible. Her sister Sallie eventually moved to Utah, so she may have gone with family initially.
I kept digging. She wasn’t yet 30 at this point after all - plenty of time for more marriages to crop up, and Ancestry kept trying to direct me to a Eula Clark who married James Haley in Los Angeles in 1923. Without anything else to go on at this point, I decided to either disprove that algorithm hit or find how it linked.
Name change, another Eula, or missing records?
Eula L. Clark married James E. Haley October 2, 1923, in Los Angeles. Eula Haley’s Social Security Death Index entry gives her birth date as February 1891. Looking again at the 1900 census, our Eula’s birthday could be Feb instead of Dec. Eula Haley died November 1967 in California.
In 1930, James Edward and Eula L. Haley had Eula’s daughter from a previous marriage living with them - Margaret Traw (b. ~1910). Both Margaret and Eula were from Alabama. Margaret was designated as being married.
By 1940, Eula and James were divorced. Her obituary in the LA Times in 1967 only mentions her daughter Margaret C. Bussey and grandson John K. Bussey Jr.
If this is our Eula, where did Clark come from? If this isn’t our Eula, who was Eula Clark? I tried to find Margaret’s marriage information - maybe there’s a hint there that will either confirm or deny that this is the Eula I’m looking for.
Eula’s Daughter
In 1929, Margaret Browning Clark of Pasadena, who was born in Alabama in 1909 and was the daughter of Eula Ledbetter of Alabama and JE Clark of New York, married Carl Russel Trau in California. It was her first marriage.
Trau wasn’t living with the Haleys in 1930 and he was apparently (it’s not a common name) living with another wife as lodgers in 1940. So it’s possible they annulled or divorced. The marriage certificate for the Bussey marriage makes her younger (says born about 1913, her headstone says 1912) but lists the same parents and birthplace and says it’s her second marriage - 9 years between marriages, age only changed 5 years. And Eula Haley was the witness. So it’s the same daughter and we have the Clark connection.
What’s Next
But now I’m looking for JE Clark in New York and assuming that’s where Fred Ernest Colburn was left behind. There’s a Fred E Colburn born in Massachusetts living with a different woman as lodgers in Brooklyn in 1920 on the census - is this the same situation as Trau’s? There are several men of the same name in that area, so he’s been difficult to track.
Or did the Colburns change their name to Clark and run to California?
Or are these two separate women of the same origin with a daughter of the same name and age. I think there are too many similarities for it to be a coincidence:
The overlap of names and initials, including Browning for the daughter and L. for Eula’s initial.
The timeline works, with no proven overlap of marriages (even if the husbands were still alive).
The geography works - Prattville to Birmingham to Enterprise to New York to California.
But stranger things have happened.
My next steps are to get all the information on Eula’s siblings that I can. Maybe something in an obituary, will, or newspaper notice will clue me in to where exactly she was in 1918-1923, who JE Clark is, what happened to EW Edmonds, and what actually started this whole thing: what happened to Fred Ernest Colburn of Webster, Massachusetts?
Know something about this? Drop me a line.