Ten-year-old Mary Elson Barnes (1893–1951)^▼1

Mary E. Barnes went by her middle name much of her life.  She came from a prominent and well-to-do family in a town of around 15,000 residents.  Chicago, St. Louis, Peoria and Springfield were accessible by train but for the first decade of Mary's life, Jacksonville was somewhat of an island.

Two children and their parents occupied the Barnes' State St. home.
With one live-in servant.

Education
Following in her father's footsteps Mary Elson Barnes graduated from Whipple Academy preparatory school then from Smith College in 1914.  In 1932 she received an MA degree from Indiana College. 


Marriage and children
In the spring of 1918 she married Frank Garm Norbury (1882–1962), a lieutenant in the Medical Reserve Corp and recent graduate of Harvard medical school.  Frank joined his father in the Norbury Sanitorium mental hospital in Jacksonville.  The pair would have three children.

Parents and siblings
 Mary was the first born child of Charles Albert Barnes (1855–1913) and Madge G. Martin (1865–1953).  Her only sibling, James Martin Barnes (1899–1958), was too young to have gone to Iroquois Theater.

Charles A. Barnes, had attended the Whipple Academy preparatory school at Illinois College in Jacksonville (where he became friends with William Jenning Bryan), then graduated from Indiana College and the University of Michigan law school in 1878.  He served as City Attorney in Jacksonville 1882-83, States Attorney of Morgan County 1894-1892 and was elected judge in Morgan County in 1898-1900, 1902, and 1906.  He was a trustee at Illinois College and a devoted participant in several fraternal organizations at local and state levels.

Mary's brother, James Barnes, served in the Marine Corps during World War I, got a Harvard law degree and came back to Jacksonville to practice. In the late 1930s he served in the U.S. Congress and in the 1940s as an administrative assistant to Franklin D. Roosevelt.  The Library of Congress archives 12,000 documents related to his career.

The Cooper girls, Julia and Margery, were the daughters of dry goods merchant Hardin Cooper (1849–_?_) and Belle Augusta Neely (1854–1942) of Chapin, Illinois, a village of around five hundred residents a few miles west of Jacksonville, IL.  In 1910 Hardin moved his family to Jackson, Missouri.

Twenty-five-year-old Julia Neely Cooper Wright (1878–1967)

Education
In 1901 Julia, who usually went by middle name, Neely, was enrolled in the Illinois Conservatory of Music Academy for Young Women at Illinois College in Jacksonville when she left school to marry.

Marriages
Insurance agent Harry Dekar Wright of Chicago.  He was the first of her three husbands.  In 1914 came veterinarian James Bovett, divorced in 1929 with mutual charges of cruelty in a dispute over $24,000 in community property.  (The court awarded Neely $5,000 in cash, a car, jewelry of unspecified value and a divorce.)  Her last husband, a house painter named Charles Sager, died of heart failure in 1964, senile and in the care of Neely and a daughter by a prior marriage.  I found no evidence that Neely had children but her stepdaughter by Sager, Evelyn Sager Watkins Harlan, was named as a survivor in Neely's obituary.

Occupation and relocations
Julia worked in sales — real estate and at department store cosmetics and jewelry counters.  It was a skillset she could take with her in the many places she lived over the years.  Reno for a quick divorce in 1929, San Francisco in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Birmingham, AL in 1938, Twentynine Palms, California in the 1940s, Oregon at the end of her life.   In Birmingham she was joined by her sister and widowed mother, a pattern that repeated with most of her moves.  I couldn't determine who went first but most of the time, if one of the Cooper women moved, so did the other two.

Interests
Architecture, art and music.

Twelve-year-old Margery Cordelia Cooper (1891–1963)

Margery's marriage in 1915 had the stability that her sister's marriages did not.  The son of a Congregational minister in Vermont, David Ashley Hooker (1879–1951) graduated from Middlebury College and pursued a career in the library field; at the time of their marriage he was assistant reference librarian of the John Crerar Library at the University of Chicago.  Margery would join him in library work, a natural environment for her academic interests.

After Chicago, in the early 1920s, the couple went to Detroit, then Bakersfield, CA later in the decade.  Their longest run was in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1930s, then it was back to California for the rest of their lives:  Riverside, Monterey, San Clemente.  Margery was an avid voter, participated in raising funds for the Red Cross and other organizations.^▼2

I wasn't able to learn much about Margery's last years and was sorry to read that she was senile at death.  Sad end for a woman who seems to have spent her life in pursuit of intellectual enrichment.  Hope the Iroquois Theater fire was one of the memories her brain buried.  Her last job in a library was as a substitute in the San Clemente Library.