| Notes |
- Isabel's birth record at Bristol says she is the second child born to Samuel A. Chafee (29) & Sarah E. Cheetham (24).
Isabel, or "Cousin Belle" as we called her, raised her two nephews after her sister died. She never married, and for many years did not cut her hair. After becoming a member of the Salvation Army, she had vowed never to cut her hair, but always wore it in a braid wound around her head. When I was a child in the 1950s and later in the 1960s, we used to visit her every 4th of July. She lived in a duplex right on Hope St. in Bristol. My mom would cut a bouquet of flowers -- red, white, & blue -- from our garden early in the morning of the holiday, and we would arrive at Belle's to find chairs already set up for us on the sidewalk. After the big parade, we would have lunch inside, usually with Merton & Estelle Morgan and their son and daughter. After I was married, a few times I took my children to visit her where she was living at the time, in the Benjamin Church apartment complex for senior citizens further up on Hope St. She always wanted to give the children a little gift. One time she gave Laura a small doll, which I later used in the center of a doll birthday cake for Laura. In the early 1980s she came to stay with my parents while recovering from either surgery or a fall, and since we lived next door, we got to see her more. She came to our house for Ben's birthday party, and raved about the homemade clam chowder and clam cakes I had made.
She was just about the same age as my Grandmother Laura (Chafee) Remington. We kids always laughed when they got together, because they tried to out-talk each other, getting louder and louder, each one expressing (or pressing) her own train of thought.
We went to her last birthday party, held at the home of a relative in Bristol. Her funeral was at St. Michael's in Bristol, but at the time I didn't realize that one of our common ancestors had been the second rector there for many years back in the 1700s.
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1899 - 1988 (88 years)
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