Without rehashing too many details, I'm going to pick up Ellen's story where I last left her. Ellen was living in Wahoo, Nebraska with Adam and daughter Allegra. Adam owned the LaGrande Hotel. When Adam died in February of 1917 Ellen was 72 and Alle was 44.
According to a piece published in volume 84 of "Hotel World: The Hotel and Travelers Journal" dated March 17, 1917, following Adam's death the hotel was taken over by W.R. Fay, the man Adam had hired to manage the property.
Horace wrote that "...failing health obliged me to retire. I went to live with my mother and sister...". I'm not exactly sure when that happened, but he didn't live with them too long. Horace died 7 months after the death of his father. They're buried in the same cemetery.
It was probably during this time as Ellen was trying to settle Adam's estate and take care of sickly Horace that Alle was compiling the family history and determining which items belonging to her father she wanted to preserve. This was also more than likely the time she had Horace write his own short, personal history.
Sometime after the death of Horace in September of 1917 and after all the affairs were settled, Ellen and Alle moved to Los Angeles, California. Alle didn't explain why they chose to go there, but census records help us make a pretty safe assumption.
You have to remember the details of their oldest son John and his family from those 1900 and 1910 census records from a previous post. John and wife his Annie ended up getting divorced. In 1910 Annie was living in Sidney with their youngest daughter, Oral. After some real digging, I found out their oldest son, Harry, had spent a year in the penitentiary in Nebraska from 1901-1902 for forging checks. After being released from prison he worked for his dad for a few years on the "ranch", then traveled between California, Colorado, Wyoming, and Washington working in the railroad industry. He may have gotten married to a woman named Christina or he may have lied about that on a job application. (But that's another mystery for another person's blog.) John and Annie's daughter Georgia, if you remember, was living with Adam, Ellen, and Alle in Lincoln in 1900. After she left Lincoln she married a man named Frank Wambaugh from Kearney, Nebraska. He was 48 and she was 26. Georgia gave birth to a baby boy whom they named Maurice, and prior to 1910 they moved to a farm in Murphy, Oregon.
By 1920 Harry and Georgia were both living with their mother, Annie, in Los Angeles. Harry was the head of household and was working as a train conductor. He reported that he was married but he had no wife living with him. Georgia and Frank had gotten divorced. Their son, Maurice, was living with Frank on his new farm in Washington state. So if Ellen moved to Los Angeles with daughter Allegra it seems obvious (to me) she went there to be with or near grandson Harry, granddaughter Georgia, and (former) daughter-in-law Annie.
But Ellen and Alle wouldn't live there long. On 13 August 1919 Ellen died. She was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.
Alle was 46 years old when her mother died. She did get married at the age of 50, but was only married for a few years before her husband died and she never had any children. It could very well be that Alle was never away from her mother for even one day of her life until her mother passed away. What a blessing she had to have been to Ellen at some very lonely stretches of time. And what a great sacrifices Allegra made to always stay by her mother's side.
All original content, images, commentary, etc. copyright © by Joy Denison 2015-2016. All rights reserved. All writings, poems, speeches, essays, images, scans, likenesses, etc. by Adam Ickes (b 1845) as well as personal histories, images, and all other content by all persons referenced and discussed within the pages and posts in this blog may not be copied, shared, or reproduced in any way without expressed permission by the owner unless included here from other referenced sources or are historical records already considered to be in the public domain.
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