10 - Wife number 4: Margaret?

We know that Albert Delmont Jones (abbreviated as ADJ) is in the 1900 census for Chicago.  He calls himself Albert Royal Delmont now and is married to Isabel and gives his work as “editor.” He claims to be 44, and she is 23. Isabel Agnes Mulhall was to become quite a character in her own right, as the article “Wife Number 2” has reviewed.

Then as article “Wife Number 3” discussed, he was to have a short lived marriage to the infamous Bambina Maud Scott.

Then in the 1930 census ADJ turns up, elderly and alone, in a state almshouse/hospital in Delaware shortly before his death and burial in a pauper’s grave that year.

I believe we may have found him in the 1910 census with wife number 4, although there are queries as detailed below. He is now calling himself Albert R Delmont and claims to be 48, married for three years to Margaret White, aged 28. He is now living in Campbell, Kentucky.

By this time he has no occupation. And he is living in the home of his in-laws, James and Johanna White. If this is the right person, this would be a fourth marriage – after Caroline Bown, Belle Mulhall, and Bambina Maud Scott.

A marriage register shows they were married on 19 September 1906, but gives no other information.

The age given in the 1910 census return is little less than his real age. But as with previous wife Isabel (and probably Bambina), Margaret is at least twenty years his junior. Men who marry much younger women often shave a few years off their age, along with taking up tennis, and cycling around in Lycra on a top-of-the-range bicycle!

However, there are two queries in the above scenario. First is that this Albert R Delmont claims to come from Virginia. Albert was born in Pennsylvania; however he grew up in Virginia. He and his family are found in that State in the 1860 census (when he was 6) and the 1870 census (when he was 16). So this could be ADJ covering his tracks from yet another past life. And this is the only Albert Delmont thrown up in the 1910 census indexes.

Second is the 1920 census. It is easy to find the same family still living in Campbell, Kentucky. Father-in-law James has died and Johanna White is now the head of the household with the same children, one of whom is Margaret Delmont. There is no Albert R in sight. Margaret claims to be only 34; however, the initial in the appropriate column suggests she has put down as a widow! But I cannot find any reference to any Albert R Delmont (or variations) dying between 1910 and 1920.

There are so many negatives about ADJ that a faked death or insurance scam, or just good riddance and I stand a better chance as a widow than as a deserted woman or divorced woman – all these scenarios are possible.

And I cannot find hide nor hair of ADJ under any combination of names in the 1920 census. However, the 1925 census for Buffalo, New York, has an Albert K Jones as a roomer in the Florida Hotel, aged 70 (the right age) and “retired.” The middle initial K looks very much like it could have been intended as an R. But then our Albert turns up as a kind of elderly vagrant in 1930.

 I am still searching, and readers of this series of articles are invited to search too. The problem is – what variation of name might he have been using?