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Thirty-two-year-old Margaret
S. "Maggie" Idall Dotts (b. 1871)* perished at the
Iroquois Theater. Maggie was one of five children
born to George (1838–1885) and Sarah "Sallie" Wolf
Idall (1841–1888) of Chester County in Pennsylvania.
Three years before her death, Maggie had married
Quaker Wilfred A. Dotts (1858–1912). Wilfred, a
divorcee, had an eighteen-year-old son, Raymond, by
his first wife, Eliza Montgomery.
Wilfred's marriage to Maggie came six months after
he filed bankruptcy with $1,900 in liabilities and
zero assets. He'd also been arrested in 1893 for
selling oleomargarine in Philadelphia. She knew
about his prior marriage and son but perhaps not
about his past business problems. Still, she had
been working as a "domestic" for a banker's family
in Rising Sun, Maryland, and life with Wilfred
probably sounded more promising.
In 1903 Margaret and Wilfred lived at 188 N.
Elizabeth in Chicago. William worked as a salesman
for Hexter & Oberndorf, a brokerage specializing in
cotton at the Board of Trade in Chicago.
Maggie's body was identified
by her husband. Burial was reportedly at
Forest Home Cemetery in Chicago, where Wilfred was
later buried as well. Nothing is known, yet, about
those who accompanied her to the theater. The pair
had not lived in Chicago long enough to have a wide
circle of friends, so probably Wilfred.
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In the years after the fire
Wilfred Dotts wasn't the sort to let grief get him down. Three weeks after
the fire, he helped incorporate Webster Lodge No.
520 of the
Knights of Pythias. Nine months after the fire,
he remarried a young woman named Ida May Padgett,
who had lost a sister at the Iroquois,
Nellie Padgett Folice. Ida was also the older
sister of the woman his son Raymond would marry in
1906.†
Somewhere between 1903 and 1912, Wilfred switched
from wholesaling cotton to wholesaling eggs, then to
real estate. In May 1912, he drafted a will leaving
his modest estate to his wife, son, and sister. In
November 1912, he was "killed by elevator" at 219-21
W. South Water Street in Chicago. Oddly, nothing was
reported as to the circumstances. The most likely
elevator accident would have been to fall or jump
down the shaft. The building where the accident
happened was occupied by H. L. Brown & Son,
commission sellers of poultry, veal, eggs where
Wilfred may have still had an office. There had been
a fire there the previous January that could have
resulted in damage to the elevator.
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Discrepancies and addendum
* In the coroner's inquest list, Margarett's last
name was miss-spelled as Dadds.
† One genealogy researcher has connected Ida with a
woman in Missouri who had three children, the first
in 1904. The Ida Padgitt who married Wilfred Dotts
reported in the 1910 census that she was born in
Illinois and had had zero children, living or dead.
Researching Padgitts is challenging because the name
was sometimes spelled, Padgett.
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