My Family Tree

California, Death Index
Name: Nellie Mary Mcelhiney
Event Date: 21 Nov 1983
Event Place: Contra Costa, California
Birth Date: 11 Mar 1903
Birthplace: Colorado
Gender: Female
Father's Name: Chatfield
Mother's Name: Chamberlin
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Education: Heald's Business College.

Occupation: Diamond Match factory, Moore Dry Dock Shipyard WWII, Sears & Roebuck, cook/housekeeper for Catholic priests.

Nella May left her second husband soon after she found out that her first husband was alive. Mote was a drinker and a man who slapped her around. When Buster got in between the two of them to protect his mother who was now pregnant with her second child and Buster ended up on the other side of the room from a swing from Mote, she knew it was time to pack up and leave.

Headstones, Hearsay and a Little History:

Mar 11, 1903: Rifle, Colorado Two years after Roy was born, Nellie "Nellie May" Mary Chatfield came along. Nellie May was estimated to be two-and-a-half pounds when she was born, so teeny her mother kept her in a shoebox warmed by the wood stove. She was her fifth baby, but her first girl, and Nellie Chatfield mollycoddled her tow-headed wisp of a child. Nellie May and Roy were Nellie's favorites of all of her children, and she spoiled them both, terribly.

It was in 1920 that Nellie May—at sixteen and the eldest Chatfield daughter—got a job working for the Diamond Match Company. Diamond Match paid good money for the day.

A clotheshorse as a young working woman, she had $5,000 worth of pearls and fancy brimmed hats, winter wool coats belted at the waist, calf-length plaid skirts and sashed tops tied to the side in streamers, cream-colored blouses with velvet ribbon running through the neckline, sheer ones cinched at the waist and coming down in a tunic, with a camisole underneath. Generous with her pay, she bought her sisters clothes too.

There was a group of free-spirited beauties working at Diamond Match. Dressed in their uniforms, bloomers tucked inside their knee-stockings, hats protecting their hair, they stood together boxing matches. Before the final wrapping they carefully wrote their names on small white cards and inserted them inside. Men wrote back to them in care of the match company, enclosing photos of themselves and their friends. They were pen-pal letters, but some of these correspondences went on for some time, and some blossomed into romances. When they could the eligible young men arranged to meet the girls at the dance hall in Paradise, a half hour's drive from Chico. Everyone danced at the dance hall in Paradise.

Buried Plot: Section A, Row 16, Site 37.
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=32457947

Records not imported into INDI (individual) Gramps ID I21159:

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