Celestia was the fourth of eight children of John Hilleary Gwynn and Ann Eliza Dyer of Prince George's County MD, born in July 1826. Her brother, Andrew Jackson Gwynn, was my 2X great-grandfather. She married Stephen Belt, the son of Benjamin Belt and Margaret Hilleary, in Washington DC in November 1846.
The couple spent most of their married life farming in Prince George's County. Stephen won prizes at the county agricultural fair for his hogs and attended meetings of the Patuxent Planters Club on topics such as how to make tobacco farming more profitable.
Late in life, Stephen became more or less an invalid, and in 1902 went to spend the winter in Baltimore with the Edelen family, Celestia's sister Emily having married Walter Edelen. Stephen died suddenly at the Edelen's on 10 March 1902. And here is where Celestia's life took a drastic turn for the worse.
Just a few hours after her husband's death, Celestia fell down the front steps of the house on her way to church, sustaining a compound fracture of her thigh, from which she never really recovered.
She spent the remaining 13 years of her life as an invalid, living with her sister Emily's family in Baltimore and getting around only with the help of crutches.
On the evening of March 22, 1915, Celestia apparently knocked over a candle next to her bed and set the bedclothes on fire. She was unable to rouse anyone or get herself out of the bed and died in the fire.There were three other women in the house at the time, Celestia's sister, Emily Edelen, and Emily's two granddaughters, Mary and Carmelite Edelen. According to the news accounts, Carmelite smelled smoke and went out to the hall only to see her great-aunt's room engulfed in flames and the fire within minutes of cutting off the stairway. She roused the other two women and they escaped in their nightclothes to a neighbor's house. Carmelite stayed long enough to call the fire department and Mary ran down the street to pull the fire alarm.
The three women ended up staying at my great-grandmother's house (Louise Gwynn Scrivener) who was a niece of Emily and Celestia and lived nearby. Carmelite became a lifelong friend of her cousin, my grandfather, Frank Scrivener, and I knew her as an elderly lady who played poker and drank whiskey with my grandfather. She was a character in her own right who was the secretary to a wealthy man and loved betting the horses among other things. She often told us about her friends who were "fabulously wealthy and beautifully connected. "
Celestia was buried beside her husband at Mt. Carmel Cemetery in Upper Marlboro. They had no children.
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