Mary Ellen Byrnes Watrous Hoover 1870
2010
Mary Ellen Byrnes was born in 1860 to her parents Michael Byrnes and a mother whose name we do not know. She was born in New York. At the age of ten, she came to Illinois on the Orphan Train. She was called a “soldier’s orphan”. She was adopted by our direct ancestors Jerome Timothy and Mary June Reynolds Watrous. We don’t know where the train stopped, but likely in Springfield, Illinois. Jerome and Mary Watrous would have traveled there in order to bring Mary Ellen home with them.
Mary Ellen came into a home where education, music and the arts were very important. She became the younger sister of Sarah Rebecca Watrous and our direct ancestor Henry Reynolds Watrous. She learned to play the piano and to paint. She moved from Illinois to Iowa with her new family in 1879. From there, she and her sister Sarah Rebecca went to school at Oberlin College in Kansas. There, Mary Ellen met Joseph Longfellow Hoover. Meanwhile her sister Sarah Rebecca married and moved back to their childhood home of Terre Haute in Henderson County, Illinois. There, in Sarah’s new home, Mary Ellen and Joseph Hoover were married in 1892. They returned to Oberlin, Kansas where Joseph worked in a bank. The next year, in 1893, Mary Ellen and Joseph became parents of a daughter. They named her Merdeces. Joseph’s jobs took them to Colorado and then to Washington State where they lived the rest of their lives. We have not found the exact death dates for Mary Ellen and Joseph Hoover. She died between 1930 and 1935. Joseph died after 1937.
Mary Ellen was known as Minnie. Her daughter Merdeces Hoover Hensley became an educated woman in her own right. She earned a Ph.D and was a Professor of Art at The University of Washington. Merdeces and her husband Perry Hensley did not have children. Mary Ellen’s posterity ended with the death of Merdeces. Merdeces’ memoirs help us to better know her mother Mary Ellen Byrnes (Watrous) Hoover.