#52 Ancestors 2022 Week 28 Characters: Cousin Carmelite

Carmelite Edelen Hubbard was a cousin of my grandfather, whom she always referred to as "Francis," even though he was Frank to everyone else, except his mother. She was born in 1890 in Prince George's County MD, the daughter of Alexander Walter (Sandy) Edelen and Mary Agnes (Mamie) Thompson. She had an older brother and sister.

When I knew her, she was in her 70's and was definitely considered the family character.  She
kept her hair a strawberry blond color (similar to the natural color of many of the Scriveners, an inheritance we share with her from our common Gwynn family ancestors, I think). 

The picture above shows her sometime in the 1960's at a family gathering at my parents' home with my grandfather, who was her only living relative.

Cousin Carmelite, as I knew her, was a hard-drinking, poker-playing old lady who was a fixture at all family gatherings. As a poker player, she was ruthless; she might as well have been wearing one of those green eyeshades.  "Elizabeth," she would say, addressing my grandmother, "I've known you for a long time, and we're friends, but I'm just going to have to raise you because I have to see what cards you are holding." 

She had a fox fur stole that I vividly remember and loved to hang out at Pimlico betting the ponies. She often dragooned my grandmother to go with her. Apparently, she spent considerable time studying the horses and was quite good at picking the winners.  

She drove a rather unreliable rattletrap car and would often call on "Francis" to come and start it for her or to deal with the disgruntled folks in whose cars she had created "just a small dent."

She used to brag constantly about the all the "fabulously wealthy and beautifully connected" people she knew. She owned a house in Bolton Hill in Baltimore, an inheritance from her grandmother, Margaret Emily Gwynn, with whom Carmelite lived as a young girl.   She converted it into three apartments, living in one herself and renting the other two floors.  She lived on the second floor because she considered that the safest location. 

My grandfather sometimes filled in a little of her history.  She had worked as a public stenographer at the Emerson Hotel (a job, I later learned, from which she was eventually fired because she liked to sneak off and head out to the racetrack). 

She was also a private secretary to a wealthy stockbroker whom she had apparently entertained secret hopes of marrying. In 1919, however, she ran off to Delaware and married John Ennals Hubbard, a lawyer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, but kept the marriage a secret from her employer. Ironically, the man actually did ask her to marry him, but then of course she had to turn him down.  When I knew her, though, John Hubbard was long dead. 

So that was what I knew of Cousin Carmelite when I was a child.  She was an eccentric old lady that showed up regularly at family gatherings.  It was not until much later, when I started researching family history, that I realized that the eccentric old lady had actually suffered much tragedy in her life, and I admired my grandfather for his steadfast loyalty to his cousin.

To begin, Carmelite was orphaned at a young age. Her mother died in 1901 when Carmelite was eleven and with her father and sister, she moved to Baltimore to live with her widowed paternal grandmother, Margaret Gwynn Edelen, and great aunt, Celestia Gwynn Belt (the sisters of my 2X great grandfather, Andrew Jackson Gwynn). Margaret Edelen had suffered her own tragedy when she was widowed barely a year after her marriage.  Her husband, Walter Edelen accidently shot himself, leaving Margaret with an infant son, Carmelite's father.

While she lived in Baltimore, Carmelite attended Visitation Academy. At the 1904 graduation exercises, James Cardinal Gibbons warned the young ladies about the dangers of reading novels and then handed out awards including two to Carmelite: one for excellence in Christian Doctrine and one for her perfect attendance. 

In 1906, her father committed suicide, shooting himself in the head in the family home. (It should be noted that Sandy Edelen himself was orphaned at a very young age when his father, Walter Edelen, accidently shot himself.)

In 1915, tragedy struck again, as the Edelen house caught fire and Aunt Celestia burned to death (a story I have told elsewhere).  It was Carmelite, according to the news story, who realized the house was on fire and roused her grandmother and sister to escape.  They could not help Celestia. 

After the fire, the three women went to stay with my great-grandmother, Louise Gwynn Scrivener, who was Margaret and Celestia's niece and lived nearby. There Carmelite met Louise's son, her cousin Frank Scrivener, about 15 at the time, and began a life-long connection to him. 

In 1920, just a few days short of her 100th birthday, Carmelite's grandmother, Margaret Edelen, died at the home in Bolton Street that she shared with her two granddaughters. 

In 1932, Carmelite's husband, John Hubbard, died at the Bolton Street house of an overdose of Veronal. She and John had no children.

Carmelite's sister, Mary Agnes, died, unmarried, in 1936.  

So, by 1940, the widowed Carmelite lived alone in the house on Bolton Street, where she stayed for the next forty years. Her brother, Alexander, lived in the western US and died in New Mexico in 1967. 

Cousin Carmelite died in Baltimore in 1981, at the age of 90. She left the house on Bolton Street and her life savings to her cousin, "Francis." She was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery near her husband. 

As I now know, that tough old lady had been through a great deal in her life and was probably very lonely.  It makes me sad when I see that her deceased cousin (My grandfather had died a few months earlier.) was the only person mentioned in her obituary. I'm glad that my grandfather looked out for her, however annoying she might have been for him, and I hope that she truly did enjoy the times she spent with our boisterous family. 

Telling this story about her reminds me, yet again, that there is no one who is not in need of our kindness, however tough they may look from the outside.