Elsie Evelyn Silvis
Elsie Evelyn Silvis was born on 8 June 1893 in Clarion County, Pennsylvania, the first child of William Irving Silvis, a lumberman, and Etna Gertrude McDowell, who had married that year. Her sister Ella Nelly came in 1895, a brother Charles in 1897 who lived only days, and her sister Gertrude in 1898. Her mother died in 1899, when Elsie was six. The family story, told by Gertrude in old age on a tape recording, is that in the days before Etna died she carried two of the little girls across a frozen stream to see their mother, the ice broke, her feet got wet, and she died of "a cold with a 3 week duration." Her father never remarried. Asked why, he said: "There was never any one like Etna." In 1900 William was in Indiana County with Elsie, Ella, Gertrude and a child Agie, and in 1903 he lost a leg in a logging accident.
On 5 June 1916 Elsie married Benjamin Whitefield Haight at Tionesta. Between 1917 and 1934 she had eight children in the lumber camps and small towns of Forest, Elk and Warren Counties: James Wakefield, Merle Eugene, Warren Wakefield, Glenn Leroy, Nellie Mae, Edna Jeanette, Lawrence Robert and Raymond Howard. In 1930 the household was at Howe Township; in 1940 at Sheffield; in 1942 her husband named "Mrs. Elsie Haight, Sheffield, Warren Co." as the person who would always know where he was. She outlived two sons, Lawrence in 1949 and Raymond in 1961.
When her father died at Brookville Hospital in August 1951, aged 91, it was Elsie, of Marienville, who signed the death certificate as informant, giving his parents as David Silvis and Betsy Brocious. In 1950 William had been living with her in Jenks Township. Her husband died in 1970. Elsie Haight died on 25 April 1982 at Marienville, aged 88, and is buried beside Benjamin in North Forest Cemetery.
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Cite: Heirology, "Elsie Evelyn Silvis (1893-1982)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/elsie-evelyn-silvis-1893-1982-9811a0.