Lois Virginia Trowbridge

My great-grandmother Lois seems to have lived a life of persistent distress.

Born in late December 1910, her mother was dead before Lois was even two weeks old. That left her, her nine year-old sister Mabel, and her 12 year-old brother Gilbert with a father who knew more about painting carriages than caring for an infant.

Although Lois’s father remarried in the summer before she turned two, her sister Mabel died a few months after that. In the years to come, her step-mother would have three young boys of her own.

Gilbert moved out before Lois turned 10, and started a family of his own. Then her father died in 1925, at 50 years old, leaving the 15 year-old Lois virtually alone.

At this point in her life, I see Lois Trowbridge wanting *out* -- wanting to get *away*. And willing to do whatever it took.

So when she met an 18 year-old from North Carolina who took an interest in her, she must have seen him as her ticket out.

My grandfather was born in July 1927, when Lois was 16 and a half. Another son would come a year later, but as far as I can tell, Lois didn’t get married until 1930, and even that’s shaky.

It’s impossible to be sure, because the entire family is missing from the 1930 census. They are completely off the grid. From what my grandfather told me, his mother left when he was young.

By 1940, Lois appears in a census again, but as a lodger (single women didn't typically rent aparements on their own back then). At some point, she married a man named Charles Gauer, who died in 1948 when after being struck by a car while changing a flat tire. In 1956, she married a man named John Rennison.
Though John was 15 years older than her, he still outlived her. Like her father, Lois died fairly young -- at 49 years-old, in 1960, in Florida. This picture of her -- the only one my grandfather had -- dates from just a year or two earlier.
My grandfather – wanting to know what had happened in her life -- requested a copy of her death certificate in 2004. The cause of death was redacted, her date of birth is wrong, and her parents’ names were listed as “unobtainable.”

There is a sense of anguish there. Why did she leave? What was she trying to get away from? And what did she want in life?

The dates in her life may be facts, but they provide no answers.