Isabella "Belle" Stewart

Belle was raised in Coshocton, Ohio. She was the eldest of two daughters born to John and Sarah Stewart, though her sister, Haddie, wasn’t born until just after Belle’s ninth birthday. 

Belle’s father was a successful businessman and the family lived comfortably in a large house on a double block on Main Street. They had a live-in servant. 

Belle probably met her future husband, Will Ells, before the Civil War when he came to Coshocton as a photographer, but she was just a young teenager at the time. They didn’t marry until 1866, a few years after the war, when she was 20 and he 27.

They had two daughters, Lulu and Bessie. For awhile, the young family lived in Newark, Ohio, a short train trip from Coshocton. Will was again working as a photographer, probably for his brother-in-law Charles Hempsted.

Sometime in the early 1870s, they move back to Coshocton where Will then worked as a cashier at his father-in-law's bank. But in 1874, at the age of 28, Belle suddenly died after an illness of less than two weeks.

The Coshocton Age newspaper reported that, “Thus has the ever-dreaded Messenger plucked from our community a devoted wife and mother, an affectionate daughter, and from society one of its most valued and highly esteemed members. Although just in the spring-time of life, the last debt of nature was liquidated with that christian fortitude enjoyed by those only who, while on earth, live an exemplary and virtuous life....The grief stricken husband, parents, and motherless children, who have been so severely tried in the afflictions of sickness and death, have the earnest condolence and sympathy of the entire community.”