Or, Subtitled: When a Widow Isn’t a Widow
This brief posting is a bit of a footnote to the posting I made a few days back about my recent discovery of burial information for my 3-g-grandmother Eliza Jane Smith (1790/1800 – 1843). As I’ve reviewed my notes for Eliza Jane with this new discovery, I’m struck all over again by two strange mistakes found in Ancestry transcriptions of and commentary on documents relating to her life. My point is not to slam Ancestry, which I use frequently to great advantage, and which does a good job of offering many kinds of records to researchers.
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BEGATS AND BEQUEATHALS 
Or, Subtitled: When a Widow Isn’t a Widow….. During WWII my great grandmother Cambray applied for citizenship. She had been born in England and moved to Canada with her family. Miss Mary Jane Cambray never married, but on that application is a picture of one very tough looking cookie and the box “Widow” is checked. My sister Lynn and I got a huge kick out of that when we found it back in 1983. Lynn’s comment was, “Would you argue with that woman? I wouldn’t!”
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Funny, Marcia, and a good illustration of how widely the term “widow” was used in the past to cover a number of “situations” that we today wouldn’t technically call widowhood. Good for Miss Mary Jane, finding ways to prevail in a world not easily pliable for single women to navigate.
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