Carrie Bowers (1866–1922) age thirty seven

Carrie had taught school in Green Bay, Wisconsin in 1893, and in La Crosse in 1893 but by 1903 was back in her hometown, teaching 4th graders at the Merrill school in Oshkosh, earning $475 per year.  Carrie and her brother Henry (see below) were the children of Anthony and (1831–1915) Margaret Stillman Bowers (1842-1916). (I failed to find a familial relationship between Margaret Stillman Bowers and Cara Stillman who died at the Iroquois.)

Jemina "Mina" Richards Bowers (1863–1949) age forty

Mina had been married for seven years to Henry Thomas Bowers (1844–1964), an officer at Ohio Cider and Vinegar Works.  The pair had one child, Henry Thomas Bowers Jr. (1901–1991), who was two years old the day of his mother's close call at the Iroquois Theater.  They later unofficially adopted a young woman.  See reference at right for Alma Georgeson.

Henry Bowers was Mina's second husband.  At age twenty-four she had given up teaching to marry a wealthy man eighteen years her senior, Andrew Thompson (1831–1893), who had been widowed only eight months earlier.  They enjoyed a long honeymoon traveling in Europe but the marriage ended noisily in the fall of 1892.  At his death four months later, Mina inherited the lion's share of his estate, roughly a half million dollars in today's money.  In a well publicized case, his two grown children by his first marriage contested the will, drafted and signed shortly before his death, but the judge found in Mina's favor.

Canadian born, Mina and her sister Alice (see panel below) were two of four children born to immigrants from Ireland and Canada: William (1813–1900) and Mary Ann Dockrill Richards (1821–1900).

Note: Several hours of research, spent mostly in eliminating other prospects, leads me to suspect the reported cousin may actually have been Anna Drummer O'Heir, Mina's niece.†  For the time being, I'll proceed with that assumption in hopes that getting the story online will elicit more information about the identity of the third woman. 

Anna Dockrill Drummer O'Heir (1873–1965) age thirty

Anna was the only child of Mina Richard Bower's sister, Alice Richards Drummer Seldon (see panel below).  Anna's late father, Henry Drummer, had immigrated to America just in time to serve as a private in the Union army during the civil war.  (Wisconsin A Company, 1st infantry.)

Though admitted to the hospital with scurvy in mid 1864, Henry had survived imprisonment in the Confederacy's Andersonville,married Alice in 1871 and died of consumption at age thirty-seven in 1878 when Anna was five years old.
Anna was married to Hugh O'Heir (1856–1936), a native of Hamilton, Ontario and in 1903 had two children.

In the years after the fire

Carrie Bowers began teaching 7th grade the year after the fire.  In 1915 she was executor of her father's small estate.  She did not marry but participated in many community activities and led a busy life.

Around 1910 Mina and Henry Bowers unofficially adopted a young woman from Scandinavia named Alma Georgeson (alternatively spelled Goergensen), possibly related to a pioneer family in Tustin, WI.  Though Alma had a large family with many siblings, the Bowers called her daughter and at her 1914 wedding to Schuyler Halsey Baldwin, Henry gave her away.  Henry  became VP of the Old Colony Trust & Savings Bank at Dearborn and Vanburen by 1914 but perhaps the stress was too much for him.  He threw a clock at Mina and in 1917 she divorced him.  He moved into the Athletic Club where he lived for the rest of his life, their son Tom sometimes staying there with him.

Mina retained her married name.  She and her sister Alice (see below), Alice's daughter, Anna Drummer O'Heir, and Anna's daughter, Frances Gillesby O'Heir, made annual travel excursions for several decades.

Anna Drummer O'Heir had a third child three years after the Iroquois fire and the family settled in Hamilton, Ontario.  In 1937 after her husband Hugh's death, she and two of the children left Ontario and relocated to Orlando, Florida In the 1950s her daughter, Frances O'Heir, operated "Frances O'Heir Distinctive Gifts" on Park Avenue in Winter Park, FL, offering a product line that would make today's collectors stand in line to get inside.  Royal Minton, Haviland, Stangl, California Ceramics, Hedi Schoop.  I'll take 5 of each, please.

Discrepancies and addendum

* Thirty-four-year-old fruit merchant Thomas Boukidis (1869–1934) was born in Greece and immigrated to America in 1893. By 1918 he'd switched from produce to confections, had four soda shop restaurants in the Loop and owned his home on Lincoln St. in Evanston.  He and his wife, Helen Lampridis / Lambredis Boukidis, had ten children.  In 1903 Chicago was in an uproar about Greek fruit street peddlers said to be running gambling joints that corrupted the young.  To read the newspapers one would get the idea that all fruit in the city was sold by Greeks.  The Boukidis family eventually left Illinois and after trying out New Mexico and Arizona, settled in California.  One of Thomas and Helen's sons, Peter Athanasius Boukidis (1917-1997), graduated with a masters degree from Harvard and became an aerospace engineer who specialized in stress analysis, working on the P-38, X-15, SST, B-1 and other projects, including designing the wings for the Gossamer Albatross, the first man-powered plane to cross the English Channel.

†  Notes on identifying mystery cousin:

• I found no female relatives in Mina's or Carrie's families known to be living in Chicago in 1903 other than Anna Drummer.  Doesn't mean they weren't there, only that I haven't found them.
• The related newspaper story reported that the cousin arrived late to the theater due to living in a distant neighborhood.  Anna Drummer O'Heir lived in River Forest, a suburb north of the Chicago Loop.  Today it would not be described as distant but was in 1903.
• Puzzling:  Throughout the newspaper story "the cousin"  is referenced so frequently that it could almost be an intended cypher.  The author could have edited the story to avoid descriptions of the cousin's actions but did not.  The cousin did this, the cousin did that. Was her name edited out at the last minute?   If it was Anna O'Heir, what could be the reason for keeping her name out of the story?  Her husband, Hugh O'Heir, had been a traveling salesman for several years so the pair was surely accustomed to doing thing independently.  He was in the process of going into business in his hometown, Hamilton, Ontario, the Dewey & O'Heir Ice & Fuel Company, but may have still been officially employed by American Wire Stretcher but that occupation shouldn't have been impacted by his wife attending the theater. 

‡ Alice said the Dionne quintuplets were exhibited for thirty minutes outside twice a day, at 11:00 am and 2:00 pm, for tourists to view through a 7-ft wire fence from a fifteen foot distance.  They lived at the Defoe hospital operated by the physician who delivered the five identical babies, two months premature.  The road leading to the hospital was described as a country lane through swampy countryside so the Canadian government built a two-mile road to accommodate the traffic, along with a custom built nursery to house them.  An estimated three million visitors went to see the girls, generating $50 million in tourism revenue.  Alice Seldon like Yvonne the best.

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