Above: This is certainly a picture of Emma Day, and it appears slightly different from the picture at the top of the page. Is it the same woman? Did my grandmother Bertha misidentify the picture at the top of the page? At this point we may never know. This picture is certainly Emma Day, since it appears to be her "business card" or calling card. I think the two pictures are sufficiently similar to be of the same woman, Emma Day.

A note on the back of the card to the left reads "This is a picture of your Aunt Emma Day [Nolan?] - to help on JK Smiths' work".

I do not understand this note. Was Emma Day previously maried to a Nolan? Did she perhaps come to Eldora to work for Jacob K Smith and later marry him?

I also have an extensive geneology of Emma Day's father's family, the Day family, stretching back to the early 17th century, compiled by Adele Andrews in 1940. It includes the following information about Emma Day.

The note below from Adele Andrews contains several errors.

Adele Andrews (1940) Genealogy

Emma Kate Day

Born Nov. 24, 1852, Mesopotamia, Ohio (or 1850)

Died Nov. 26, 1884 Mitchell, S. Dak. buried Mitchell.

Married Oct. 9, 1876 Eldora , Ia, Jacob K. Smith, son of Samuel Smith and [ERROR] Mary Todd Smith [/ERROR] of Eldora. He was born Aug. 6, 1851 in Eldora, died Sept. 8, 1934 in Mitchell, where he is buried. He married (2) at Liscomb, Ia Dec. 17, 1890 Sadie Speicher who died Nov. 29, 1938 Marshalltown, Ia, where she is buried.

The children of Jacob and Emma Day Smith were two:

Vernon, born about 1879, Mitchell [LIKELY ERROR: CENSUS SAYS IOWA] . died about 1880

George Day, Born May 9, 1882 Mitchell

Data furnished by G.D. Smith
U.S. Census 1860 Trumbull Co., Ohio.

One sister of Emma Kate Day, was Helen M. Day (see picture, right). Hellen M. Day married Charles H. Kibee, on 2 or 3 July 1861 and gave birth to her children in Eldora Iowa.

Charles Kibee was a civil war cavalry veteran, and by 1880 a harness maker. (I believe he was later a banker in Mitchell. Check this.) Hellen would later receive a widows pension, and these records are available somewhere - I've seen them online.

Emma Day (if born in 1852) was about 9 years old at the time of her sister Hellen Day's marriage to Charles H. Kibee.

It would be another 15 years before she would marry Jacob K Smith, in 1876, when she was already 25. She would live only 8 years as a married woman before dying in 1884 at the age of aproximately 32, when her only surviving son, G. Day Smith, my grandfather, was 2 years old.

I speculate that Helen M. Day (right) followed her civil war veteran husband Charles H. Kibbee out to Mitchell, South Dakota where he became a banker and possibly founded a bank in that town. I speculate that Helen M. Day then "arranged" the marriage of her sister Emma to Jacob K. Smith a real estate dealer in the town of Mitchell.

I have recently [March 2006] reviewed the Day genealogy by Adelle Andrews and discovered that another of Emma Kate's sisters, Laura M. Day, married to a man by the name of William Beldon, bore her 2nd of three children in Eldora Iowa (1869). In addition Helen birthed her 2 children in Eldora (1866, 1872).

We also see in the 1880 census (bottom of page) that Hellen (picture on right) lived in Eldora with Charles Kibee and had several children there before they migrated to Mitchell SD.

So we see that the 2 other Day sisters had some connection to Eldora. The circumstances that brought Jakob K. Smith and Emma Kate Day together will probably remain shrouded in mystery. But it is likely that Emma Kate Day was very much a "hometown girl", a native of, or frequent visitor to Eldora Iowa.

Since the first child Vernon was born in Iowa, perhaps they met in Eldora and perhaps she gave birth to him there too, in 1879.

We know only that one branch from the Days of Mesopotamia (that of Emma Kate's father Willard Day) was in some way connected to Eldora Iowa to the extent that two sisters gave birth to children there, and a third sister (Emma Kate) married a man (Jacob K. Smith) who was born there.

The fact of a Day connection to Eldora somewhat explains the logic of G. Day Smith being sent back to to Eldora to be raised following Emma Kate's death in Mitchell South Dakota. He was being sent to the town where his father's parents lived, but not to be raised by them because they were already quite old. Rather, G. Day Smith was perhaps sent to a family with connections to his mother's family, the Days. Whether "Aunt Mea" and "Uncle John" were connected to the Days by lineage or friendship is an open question.

We don't know yet if Vernon was born in Eldora, but he was born in Iowa. We do know that Laura Maria's second child was born in Eldora (from the Andrews genealogy.)

Jacob was born in 1851, and was thus about Emma's age. (However, if she was born in 1842 as one record has it, then he married a woman 9 years older than him. The birth date of 1850 or 1852 seems more likely. I've recently discovered a claim for a birthdate of 24 Nov 1861 for Emma Day in the "international genealogical index" - one more possibility to investigate. However that date seems impossible relative to the age of her mother.) The census age of 28 in 1880 seems closest to the truth, yielding a birth date of 1852.