I mention it here because the whole affair of the girls destinies, as managed by their mother Christine was a right muddy boot in the syllabub. Emeline married a man who had been in the Civil War, an Army man and a Marine. His early military record showed him a con-man and an abuser of authority. Emeline had previously been married by elopement (annuled later) to a young singer named William Carleton, warbler of Irish Ballads. Mother stopped that with warrant and revolver and had her then married off to the respectable (on the surface) Major J. C. Shailer to whom she bore one too many children and she died in middle age. Her children melted into obscurity. Alice and Emeline's father went mad separated from her mother who then died and left poor Alice, who had all her family and even her husband, an ill heir to a shipping magnate, Marshall Webb, dead and gone. She spent the rest of her days (with no relatives in the United States that I know of) in the Pavillion Cottages at Sharon Springs in Sunnyside in the company of a Miss Eldredge. It saddens me, to see this bittersweet summer of butter and white linen end to a life whose details I had longed to find.
Do you know when Christine died?
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