♀Mabel Wilkinson

Mabel Wilkinson (26 November 1875 – 7 May 1954) was an Illinois woman, the wife of the Mount Carmel physician Sereno Watson Schneck, who served as Regent of the Mount Carmel chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1927–1928, having joined on the Revolutionary record of her maternal ancestor John Harvey. She was the grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Mary Esther Schneck (1900–1968).

Early life

Mabel was born on 26 November 1875 at Friendsville, Wabash County, Illinois, the daughter of Robert Thomas Wilkinson (1850–1917) and Julia Esther Harvey (1857–1951), and was baptized at Mount Carmel on 4 March 1876. A biography published in the Illinois state history of the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1925 records that she was educated in the Mount Carmel public schools, graduating with the class of 1894, and entered Oxford College at Oxford, Ohio, a year later; a family narrative adds that she won class honors there on 21 May 1896.

In May 1893, at seventeen, she was maid of honor at the wedding of her mother’s brother, held at the residence of Dr. James Harvey on West Second Street, Mount Carmel, according to the notice in the Mount Carmel Register.

Marriage and family

On 4 April 1899 she married Dr. Sereno Watson Schneck (1875–1953) of Mount Carmel, the son of Dr. Jacob Schneck and Mary Hartman. He practised medicine in the town for more than fifty years and served as a surgeon for several railroads. The couple had two children, Mary Esther, born in 1900, and Robert Jacob, born in 1901, who also became a physician. By 1918 the family lived at 431 Cherry Street, Mount Carmel, and they were still there in 1930.

Her husband was a keen motorist. A family narrative records that he owned the Buick that Bob Burman drove to victory in the first feature race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1909, and that he drove his own cars in races until his wife insisted he stop. The same narrative says he kept pushing the speed limits on ordinary roads, and that he had a 1937 Ford tuned to run at over a hundred miles an hour so that he would have the fastest car in town.

Mabel was a member of the Methodist church. In the Mount Carmel chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution she was Vice-Regent from May 1924 until May 1927, when she was elected Regent. Her published chapter biography also calls her a lineal descendant of Augustus A. Tougas dit Laviolette, whom it describes as the first white man to settle in Wabash County. Her widowed mother lived with the family in her last years; the 1940 census lists Julia Wilkinson, aged 83, in the Schneck household as mother-in-law.

Later life and death

Sereno Schneck died on 21 April 1953. Mabel then went to live near her daughter, Mary Esther Blanchard, in Great Falls, Cascade County, Montana. Her obituary speaks of a lingering illness of ten months. Her Montana death certificate records that she died at 7 p.m. on 7 May 1954 at 1517 Third Avenue, Great Falls, a residence rather than a hospital, of generalized arteriosclerosis, with a doctor attending her since about January. Her daughter gave the details for the certificate, which still named Cherry Street in Mount Carmel as her usual home. Her body was taken back to Mount Carmel, and she was buried on 12 May 1954 in Rose Hill Cemetery, in the family mausoleum her husband had built for his parents.

Notes

The 1925 biography, the family’s own lineage papers and the family narrative all give the marriage as 4 April 1899; the obituary quoted in the narrative gives 4 April 1898. The narrative also places her death in a hospital near her daughter’s home, while the death certificate states that she did not die in a hospital.