Happy Birthday, Ruth Belle!

One-hundred-two years ago today, on January 19, 1897, Sarah Frances Doron gave birth to her second child, a girl they named Ruth Belle. The occasion must have been joyous, but also exceptionally poignant. Only 11 days earlier Sarah and her husband, Francis Marion DeWitt, called Frank, had lost their first child, Edna Gertrude, who was only 2½. I have five grandchildren near that age at the moment. How do people endure such loss? I don't know how Edna died, but I understand that it was a ruptured appendix that took Ruth, 19 years later. These photos are of Ruth Belle DeWitt, taken shortly before her death, and of her younger brother, my grandfather Sidney Theodore Roosevelt DeWitt, called Ted, who died of pneumonia at age 35. Frank died a few years after that, leaving Sarah, who passed on ... I still don't know when.

Frank, Sarah, Ruth, and Ted were all baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Atlantic, Iowa, in May 1912. Some of the missionaries, so the story goes, thought that 12-year-old Ted might like to correspond with a recently baptized member just his age from over in Webster City—Anna Louise Fort, called Louise, or sometimes Lula. Ted and Louise corresponded for several years, eventually met, and were married in 1920, after which they came with Ted's parents and some of Louise's family to Ogden, Utah, where their four children—Marian, Robert, Donald (my father), and Jack—were born before Ted's untimely death in 1935.

I have known this general story all my life, except I never noticed how close Ruth's birth was to Edna's death, and I never noticed until yesterday that Frank and Sarah made the journey to Salt Lake City to be endowed and have their children sealed to them in August 1917, less than a year after Ruth died and three years before they moved to Utah. The ordinance, I'm sure, was a comfort to them. Something else that I discovered only recently was that one of the missionaries involved in the Romance of Ted and Louise was Andrew Child, whose brother, John, was the upright widower farmer who—two years after Ted's death—rescued Louise and her boys (the tea leaves apparently having said yes) from Depression-Era Ogden and moved them to the farm in Clinton, where they joined John Child's eight children, the oldest the age of his new step-mother. Marian didn't move to the farm, though. She stayed in town with Grandma Sarah, who no doubt enjoyed the company.

And now they're all gone ... except Marian. It will be Aunt Marian who will know if ... I mean WHEN Sarah Frances Doron left this mortal coil. And maybe, just maybe, she can tell me what became of that crystal ball.