John and Sadie Coleman had five children who survived into adulthood. The second of their four daughters was named Aileen Gertrude Coleman and she was born in about 1904. Aileen has been an interesting relative to track down, and only in part due to having to separate her records from that of my grandmother's older sister Eileen Dolores Coleman who was born in 1907. I still haven't found a common Coleman ancestor to attribute the two cousins being so similarly named. The closest would be their grandmother Ellen Ross Coleman.
As with all of John and Sadie's children, there has been some challenge in finding out what happened to them over the course of their lives, a matter made more complicated by multiple name changes due to marriage and divorce. Aileen is no different. When I first found Aileen in the 1930 Census, she was listed as Aileen Myers and divorced. She and her son, Raymond (then 3 years old) had moved back home with her mother and siblings. In the 1940 Census, she is again living with her mother and son, but this time her name is Aileen Stiles. She is listed as married, but there is no husband living with her.
So now I had to set out to find two husbands for Aileen. Based on the information I had, I put an approximate timeline on her first marriage to be about 1925 and her divorce must have taken place between about 1927 and 1930. I dug around and eventually found a marriage record for Aileen's first marriage. She married Leslie Louis Myers on October 31, 1925 at St. Andrews Church in Oakland. Their son, Raymond Lester Myers, was born about six months later on May 2, 1926. Since it would appear Aileen was pregnant when she and Leslie Myers married, perhaps things fell apart because of the "shotgun wedding" aspect.
I started looking to see if I could find any record of their divorce and while I've yet to find a confirmed documentation for the date of their divorce, I did find the reason why. While searching through the Oakland Tribune for divorce notices, I found a couple of articles in January 1929 that indicated Leslie had been arrested for embezzlement. According to the January 7, 1929 edition of the Oakland Tribune, Leslie Myers had forged and sold $2000 worth of stock certificates while working as an assistant bookkeeper at the Montgomery and California Street branch of the Bank of Italy (which would later become the Bank of America) due to "destitute circumstances and illness of his wife and baby." He surrendered himself to the San Francisco police on January 5 and "told police he was a 'two-time embezzler,' having taken $1500 from an Oakland Loan company two years ago." Leslie was apparently on probation for the earlier embezzlement which was nearing it's completion as he had repaid most of the money he had stolen. (While the article doesn't state as much, I would imagine the repayments from his first embezzlement came from money he obtained from the second one.) A follow up article in the January 23, 1929 edition of the Oakland Tribune reported that Leslie Myers was sentenced to five years in federal prison. Sure enough, the next time I found Leslie Myers was in the 1930 Census in the federal prison at McNeil Island in Washington. His record shows him as married, so I'm guessing the divorce was in progress around the time of the census or the prison official who completed the census form did not have a current file on Leslie Myers marital status. Leslie Myers died in July 1977.
Now it was time to find Aileen's second husband, Mr. Stiles and determine what happened to him. Why isn't he living with Aileen in the 1940 Census? It's a little too early for him to have gone off to fight in World War II, though that could have been a possibility if he'd gone to Canada or the UK which were already involved in the fighting by then. I needed to back track then and see if I could find any record of an Aileen Stiles between 1930 and 1940. That's where the city directories and voter registries came in handy, and I eventually found Aileen Stiles in a 1932 voter register in Oakland. Mr. Stiles wasn't listed on that record, but there was another register for 1934 and this time I found her with her husband Nelson H. Stiles, a truck driver. The latest record I was able to find of them living together was a 1938 voter register. I went off to the newspapers then to see what I could find and I eventually turned up a notice of a divorce granted to Aileen Stiles from Nelson H. Stiles in the July 4, 1941 edition of the Oakland Tribune.
After her second divorce, Aileen went back to using the name Aileen Myers, presumably because that was the same last name as her son's. I'm still looking into Aileen to find out what happened to her after she divorced for the second time. Right now, I've been able to track her until about 1956 through city directories. I have yet to find a death record for her and I have found very little information on her son Raymond. So there a couple more puzzles to work out.
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