The Search for William W. Pennington

After my mother died, I wanted to try to get more information on my grandmother Ruth Nave.  Her first husband, Benjamin Franklin ("Frank") Reed was my grandfather.  After he died in a railroad accident in 1917, my grandmother married again.  She later had a third husband, Harold White.  To get more information, I visited my aunt Margaret in Orlando.  She told me that she and my mother had been adopted by two of Frank Reed's brothers.  She had been adopted by Don Francis Reed and his wife Grace McElroy.  My mother had been adopted by Perry Wilmer Reed and his wife Mary LeSourd.  Aunt Margaret indicated that the Reeds had not been fond of Ruth Nave, and had "ganged up on her" to take the two younger of her children away from her.  Her oldest child, her son Donald Reed, was 16 years old at the time, and the family left him with his mother.  

My mother never talked about her mother, except once.  After my cousin Dale, Aunt Margaret's daughter, told me when we were both 10 years old that Aunt Margaret and my mother had been adopted, I asked Mom about it.  She tersely informed me that it was true, and her parents' names had been Frank Reed and Ruth Nave.  After my mother died, I found among her papers a copy of her original birth certificate and a copy of the final decree of adoption, which bore out what she had told me.

 When I talked to aunt Margaret during my visit, she told me that Ruth Nave had been married twice more after my grandfather died.  Her second husband had borne the surname Pennington, and her third husband was named Harold White.  I had known this latter fact, having obtained a death certificate of my grandmother in 2006 based on what little information Mom told me when I asked her about her being adopted.  Ruth Nave had died in 1951 in Logansport, Indiana, under the name Ruth White.  The informant on the death certificate was her husband, Harold White.  I found my grandmother's grave at the Mount Hope Cemetery in Logansport.

Earlier this year, after I retired and was finally able to work on my own family history once again, I got curious about my grandmother's second husband.  I have not yet found a marriage certificate for them.  The only other possibility was that he had been buried in the same cemetery where Ruth Nave was buried, Mount Hope.  I went to an independent online index of burials and found, among seven graves under the name of Pennington, only two which predated the year of my grandmother's death, 1951.  One was a woman, and the other was William W. Pennington, who died in 1927 at the age of 29.  I searched for a death certificate, and found the record of the death of William Walter Pennington.  The informant was his wife, Ruth Pennington.  From there, I found a listing in a Logansport city directory for Ruth Pennington, widow of William.  She was living at an address I had previously found for her, which lent credence to her being the informant and William Walter Pennington being her second husband. 

 There is an irony, which I wonder if my grandmother realized.  Both Frank Reed and William Pennington were 29 years old when they died.