Martha Weems, the daughter of Edwin Dawson Weems and Rosa Norman and a distant cousin to me, was born 16 April 1872 in Elk Ridge Landing MD. She had a far more adventurous life than one might have expected from the daughter of a steamboat engineer on the Chesapeake Bay. According to her son, Edwin Weems Winkler, "Dolly" Weems was a vivacious girl who loved company and parties and could drive and ride with the best of them. Her mother was apparently a very strict woman with severe Victorian ideas of what was appropriate behavior for her daughter, and this made Dolly long to get away from home.
In pursuit of this goal, Dolly took up with a man named Cole, according to her son, "a handsome man, a drinker, a gambler, and one who never worked if he could get out of it." They were married in 1890 and divorced within a year or two, which her mother saw as disgraceful. So Dolly was sent off to live with her mother's sister, Eugenia Norman, who had married a Civil War veteran, Walter Arnold, and had a ranch near Helena MT, to live down the scandal.
After a year or two in Montana, Dolly returned home to Maryland, but found her mother still bitter about her divorce and soon moved to Baltimore to live with a cousin. She found work in the Bayview Asylum, where she met her second husband, Louis Winkler (about whom I have written in a previous post See
https://annesgenealogyadventures.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-disappearance-of-louis-winkler.html
The marriage went from bad to worse as the family faced financial difficulty, and Dolly became more and more quarrelsome. Finally, after a particularly loud quarrel, Louis simply walked out on his pregnant wife and daughter. After the birth of her son a few days later, Dolly took the children back to her parents' home in Solomon's Island, but found that situation untenable with her mother's continuing disapproval. Dolly wrote to her uncle (Walter Arnold) in Montana, whose wife had just died, and finally went back to the ranch to act as his housekeeper in the spring of 1904, and formally filed for a divorce from Louis when she got to Montana.
Dolly married in Montana for a third time in 1910 to George Clifford James, a WWI veteran who had served in France, as his second wife. They had a son, Clifford George James, in 1911. The third marriage apparently didn't go much better than the first two. By 1913, Dolly applied for a homestead in Montana and by 1917, George was declaring that he would not be responsible for any debts incurred by his wife.
Martha "Dolly" Weems died in Bozeman MT in 1923. Her daughter Mary Winkler died of the Spanish flu in 1918. Her son Edwin Winkler eventually moved to North Carolina and worked as a professor at UNC and NC State.
