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This is not a sepia tone but rather a cheap snapshot that is yellowed, fly-specked, and stained after years of storage in the tropics (note palm roof in background).  Could someone endeavor to clean it up, please.

I think that George's wife was Jane Logan and that they married somewhere in New York.  I think George probably went to America before 1844.  This is all guess work

sometimes bodies went unburied for several months because the gound was frozen (in the US, at least)

I think that the saddest death in my family is the death of my grandmother’s cousin, Arthur.  Arthur was the son of  missionaries in Micronesia and he and his wife Margaret continued in that line of work until they retired to California.  They did not give up good works after their retirement, though.  They visited and helped abandoned and friendless inmates in the California prisons.  One of the prisoners they undertook to help was a woman serving a lengthy term for duping and murdering a man in order to take possession of his property.  Her name was Louise Peete.  When Louise was finally released from prison, Arthur and Margaret took her in.  By this time Arthur was senile and somewhat addled.  Louise had him declared insane and confined to a state mental hospital; she told the hospital authorities that Arthur’s only sister had fallen out with him and did not wish to see him.  Then she murdered Margaret and took control of their property.  Arthur died alone and forgotten in  the asylum, wondering why his wife and sister never came.  Louise died in the electric chair, the last woman executed in California.

Thanks for searching for me Carol.  I think 1869 is probably the correct birth year – this is the date I got from my mother (May Augusta was her grandmother) and it coincides with May Augusta’s age as reported in the 1871 and 1881 censuses – though I suppose it could be 1868 or 70.  I am more inclined to think the place of birth was misrepresented on the census (both report Bristol as the place of birth).  Or maybe May was a nickname she used instead of Mary or Margaret.

Family lore says that the Marshalls were relatively wealthy and socially well placed, with some connection to the government.  May Augusta apparently retained some kind of attachment to her birth family or at least she did not repudiate them entirely, because both of her sons had Marshall as a middle name.

As I said, I have a hunch about these Marshalls, having found a Marshall family of the right social class, with connections to the gov’t, living near Bristol (Bath, Backwell), in the right time period, with several females named May and/or Augusta, and (incredibly) an apparently illegitimate daughter who went by the name May Augusta Marshall (although, alas, not my May Augusta).  If this is, in fact, her family, I think they would have baptized her even though illegitimate because the family is simply riddled with clergymen.

I don’t know how to go about looking for her.  Any suggestions?