[or-roots] Pearl Etta Wilson/Smith/Doughty -- Bay City

[Chris & Bill Strickland]

Help -- I am in communication with a fellow who hopes someone can shed 
some light on his great-great aunt Pearl Etta (or Pearlyetta, etc.)  
Wilson/Smith/Doughty, who was living with my great grandmother Mary 
Elizabeth (Williams) Rose and her son Karl in 1920 in Ashland as a 
live-in nurse. 
 
   He is ultimately trying to locate his great-grandfather, Pearl's 
brother, Clarington E. Wilson, but perhaps some more information on 
Pearl will help in that quest.
 
   Pearl was born in NY in 1862, but moved with her family to Iowa not 
long after the Civil War.  They lived briefly in Howard Co., IA then 
homesteaded in Dickinson Co., IA about 1869.  Her mother died in 1875, 
and her father soon remarried a young gal not much older than Pearl.  
Pearl shortly went back to Howard Co., where she lied about her age and 
married in 1877.  She and her husband had three children, and they moved 
up into Minnesota around 1900.  Some time between 1910 & 1920, Pearl 
divorced her husband and headed west, leaving her two grown daughters 
and about 10 grandchildren in Minnesota.  He found her in Ashland (with 
my great-grandmother) in January of 1920, but in May of 1920, she 
married a man 9 years her junior in Bay City, Oregon.  She had almost 
surely known [her new husband's] family in Dickinson Co., IA in her 
childhood, but her new husband was born in Oregon after his family 
migrated west.
 
   They are trying to connect the dots as to why she would travel from 
Brainerd, MN to Ashland, OR, just to work as a nurse for my 
great-grandmother, then move suddenly to Bay City several years 
before Mary died.  Her brother Clarington had been one of the founders 
of Bay City in 1888-1889, but he left under a cloud, deserting his 
great-grandmother & her infant son (his grandfather) during 1889, 
returning only briefly around 1893.  Pearl apparently had some limited 
contact with him, but we have no records of him after that time.  Family 
stories (from Pearl, we think) place him in the SF Bay area at the time 
of the great earthquake & fire, at which time he totally disappeared.  
We believe he was formally declared dead around 1919, and my grandfather 
received a small inheritance, but we have found no probate records.  We 
explored the possibility that Pearl had inherited (or maybe purchased) 
some land from him in Bay City, but have found no records of that either.