Mariah Emma Bruner

Called Emma. Widowed at about 25 with three small children when John Clifford died in 1879. In June 1880 she was "Emma Clifford," 26, housekeeper, at the silver camp of Gothic, Gunnison County, Colorado, with Orlando, Eli and Jessie, and her brother Heck ("E. G. Bruner"), blacksmith, enumerated alongside them. In 1881 she married J. L. Davis in Benton County, Arkansas, where her widowed mother lived; with his two adopted children, Sigel Charles and Pluma Davis, the family had five children before their daughter Elizabeth Jane was born at Siloam Springs in 1883.

On 16 August 1893, as Mrs. Emma Davis of Delta, Colorado, she married John [H.?] Dunlap there, her daughter Jessie Clifford, then seventeen, a witness (record). As Emma Dunlap, in 1910 she was in her daughter Jessie's household in Kitsap County, Washington, and in January 1920 in Jessie's household on Mercer Street, Seattle. Seated at the center of the family photograph of about 1930-32. She spent her last years in Jessie's town of Wheatland, California, and is buried there.

Open questions

• The Dunlap chronology. She married John Dunlap at Delta in 1893 as "Mrs. Emma Davis," and was a widow by 1910, while John L. Davis lived until 1914 (per FamilySearch): how her marriage to Davis ended (a divorce?), and when and where John Dunlap died, are not known. His middle initial on the certificate is unclear.
• The Clifford marriage record, c. 1872-73 (Arkansas or Iowa).
• The 1900 census, under any of her four surnames.
• Her son Eli's death certificate gives her birthplace as Missouri; every census says Indiana.