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Edith was the first child of Richard Wray and Jane Archdale, born on June 16, 1849 at 1804 English Prairie Road. In a letter dated June 27, 1849, a neighbor, Anna White, wrote to her sister Elizabeth with all the latest news of the prairie, including this about Edith: “…there is a newcomer on the prairie. Mrs. Ray has a little daughter, and mother says it is a beautiful child”.
Edith was married to Frank H. Robinson on December 31, 1868 at age 19. His father was a farmer by Richmond, but he also worked as a railway station agent. Frank and Edith settled in Danville, IL, where Frank worked as a railroad engineer for the Wabash Railroad. The 1880 census shows they had three children: Janie, age 7, Richard Wray, age 2 and infant Harry, born that year. In 1886, tragedy struck when little Harry died at his grandfather’s farm on English Prairie when Edith was visiting her parents. Frank came up from Danville and a funeral was held. It’s very likely that 6-year-old Harry was buried in the Imeson-Wray family cemetery, but apparently no record exists.
The Robinson family moved to Chicago where Frank worked for the I. C. & E. Railroad but on July 24, 1892, he died of typhoid fever in Chicago and was buried in the Wray Cemetery. For reasons soon revealed, he was a bit of a mystery to genealogists doing research on the cemetery in 1997.
The 1900 Census shows Edith living in Chicago with her now married daughter, Janie, and listed as “widowed”. However, by November 5, 1900 she moved to Osage, Iowa as the new wife of James Gardner. James was born in England in 1842 and worked as a farmhand for Harvey Gardner (uncle?) on English Prairie in 1870. He must have been an acquaintance of Edith’s from those many years earlier. He was 58 at the time of his second marriage to Edith and she was 51.
In the meantime, in 1894, Edith’s mother, Jane Archdale Wray, was remarried to James Serviss a contractor, in Los Angeles! She was 70 and he was 56 at the time of their marriage. James moved to California in 1890 and had divorced his first wife in 1893. It is unknown how they met, but after seven years of marriage Jane died on June 20, 1901 of heart problems. Her estate was worth $4,900 ($170,000 in today’s dollars). (One of Jane’s other daughters soon filed a Bill of Complaint against Serviss and her own siblings but the outcome is unknown.)
Jane Archdale Wray Serviss has a nice headstone, but it’s not the one with her name carved on it with her first husband, Richard, in the Wray family cemetery. For whatever reason, her body wasn’t brought back, but buried in the Angelus Rosedale Cemetery in Los Angeles, which explains why there is a birth date and no death date on the Richard Wray monument.
Six months after her mother’s death, Edith herself went to Los Angeles with her husband “and other relatives” to spend the winter “for her husband’s health” but she died suddenly there on October 5, 1901! The obituary stated, “Mrs. Gardner was well known to the older people of this [area] and was noted for her genial spirit and cheerful disposition. Her friends were legion, and she will be greatly missed... The remains arrived in Richmond Friday morning and were taken to the home of her brother… Interment was in the family cemetery on English Prairie by the side of loved ones who had gone before..."
While her remains were buried next to her first husband, Frank Robinson, her stone was carved “Edith Wray, Wife of James Gardner”, (they had been married less than one year)! In the 1990s, the cemetery genealogists didn’t know that Mrs. James Gardner was Edith Wray Robinson Gardner and thought Frank was perhaps the only person in the cemetery without a connection to the Wray, Imeson, or Lawson families. (Ironically, Edith’s husband James, whose health they went to California for, lived a long life and died at age 89. He was buried in California.)
Next week: more interesting stories about the Wray children and another Wray mystery.
Story by Laura Frumet
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