Isabella Short

Aunt of Ruth (Short) Ellingwood, the youngest of John Short and Mary Jeffrey's children, born at Newcastle ten years before her father died. She married James Hay Jr., a Woodstock man of her own age, in October 1878, a year before her brother John Gerald married Mary Pattullo there, and their son, Thomas Lyall Hay, was born in 1879. The middle name was her grandmother's maiden name, as the family accounts have it: Mary Lyall, wife of William Jeffrey (source).

Her home at Woodstock was the family's: her sister Mary, a bookkeeper, lived with the Hays in 1891, and her eldest sister Jane in 1901 (the censuses, as WikiTree gives them). James Hay died in May 1912. Isabella died at Woodstock on 12 January 1924, four days after her brother Joseph William at High River, whose obituary had named her among his surviving sisters as "Mrs. James Hay." She and her husband share a stone at the Woodstock Presbyterian Cemetery: "In loving memory of James Hay Jr., born Oct 4-1848 in Woodstock, died May 1-1912; Isabella, wife of James Hay, daughter of John and Mary Short, born in Newcastle Ont. Aug. 1-1848, died in Woodstock Jan. 12-1924" (record).