♀Elizabeth Phipps

Elizabeth Phipps (died 11 February 1941) was a farmer’s wife in Lake County, Illinois, the youngest daughter of an English-born upholsterer. She was the grand-aunt of Frederic Roger Curtis (1928–2007), the sister of his grandmother Emily Josephine Phipps (1868–1919). She was the daughter of William Bennett Phipps (1827–1898) and Emily Eliza Morgan (1838–1895).

Early life

The 1870 census, taken that summer in the city’s Eighth Ward, found her in Chicago at five months old, about fourteen months after her sister Emily Josephine, in her father’s household. In 1880 she was ten and still at school there, with her sisters Lilian and Emily Josephine.

Marriage and family

On 16 October 1894, in Lake County, she married Mathias F. Thommessen (1861–1936), a farmer born at Buffalo, New York, to German parents. Their only child, William Stratford Thommessen (1895–1971), was born in August 1895, and her mother died in Chicago that October.

The couple were living at Grayslake, in Avon Township, in 1900. By 1910 they had moved to Warren Township, and they were still there in 1920, by which time their son had a household of his own. When her sister Emily Josephine Curtis died in Chicago in April 1919, the Chicago Tribune’s notice named Elizabeth as “Mrs. M. F. Thommessen”.

Later years

Mathias died in Warren Township on 9 January 1936 and was buried at Warren Cemetery on 12 January. In 1940 Elizabeth, then a widow of sixty-nine, was living in Warren Township in her son’s household. She died there on 11 February 1941, at the age of seventy-one, and was buried at Warren Cemetery at Gurnee on 14 February.

Notes

Her birth date

Her death certificate gives 5 February 1870, and the 1870 census enters her at five months with February as her month of birth; the two agree. Later records place her birth a year or two later: the 1900 census gives February 1871, and the censuses of 1910 and 1920 and a Find a Grave memorial give ages that point to 1871 or 1872. The birth date given here follows the 1870 census and the certificate.

Her names

Her death certificate names her Mary Elizabeth Thommassen and gives her mother as Emily C. Morgan, where this page has Emily Eliza Morgan. The 1880 census writes her as Bessky, and the censuses of 1900 and 1910 as Bessie. Her husband’s surname is spelled Thommessen, Thommassen and Thommersen in different records.