Maud Elizabeth Noel

Maud Noel was born in Illinois, probably at Braidwood, to English parents, Samuel Hall Noel, an optician, and Elizabeth N. Todd, who later divorced. At 21 she married John R. Morilon, a blacksmith from Kansas, at the Presbyterian manse in Seattle on 12 Aug 1910, with her father as a witness. In 1911 her husband and her father were living in the same building, 107 1st Avenue North. Their son John Noel, known as Donald, was born on 19 July 1911, and Douglas at Helena, Montana, on 25 Aug 1916, where Morilon was a sanitary inspector at the East Helena smelter.

By Sept 1918 she was back in Seattle and living apart from her husband. By the family's account, she worked in a coffee shop near the ferry slips, where she met Capt. Richard Blackmer Holbrook Jr., then a master on the Bremerton boats and still living with his wife Jessie ("Richard 'RB' Holbrook, Pollock South Dakota 1923," GenForum Holbrook board, posted by Dan Holbrook, 21 April 1998). In 1920 Morilon remarried at Helena, calling himself a widower. None of them is in the U.S. census of Jan 1920 or the Canadian census of 1921. Her son Douglas remembered a childhood "in Canada, Washington, Idaho, Oregon and North and South Dakota" (obituary-douglas-morilon-2003), and Richard had crossed into Canada bound for Fort McMurray "to make a home." By 1923 they were farming near Pollock, South Dakota, she as Mrs. Maud Holbrook. No marriage of the two has been found, and neither seems to have been divorced. When Richard died of typhoid at Bismarck on 22 Sept 1923, she gave the particulars for his death certificate.

Within months she married Hiram M. Wallace, a Presbyterian farmer of the Pollock neighbourhood, six years her junior (married in 1923, by his 1935 census card). They had two sons, born at Fort Yates, North Dakota, in 1927 and 1932, and lived in Sioux County, North Dakota, and Campbell and Corson Counties, South Dakota, where Hiram ran a sawmill; Douglas remembered "helping run a family sawmill." In the censuses she took about seven years off her age, nearer Hiram's, and in 1930 Douglas was entered as Hiram's own son. Hiram died in 1960 and was buried at Pollock. She died in Washington County, Oregon, near Douglas, in 1986.

Who she was was ruled on 9 Oct 2026 (Research decisions). The whole case, with the documents, is in the research thread.

Open questions

• Where she, Richard and the boys were from 1919 to 1922: Canada? Searches of the Canadian immigration and border indexes, the Alberta homesteads and BC marriages (9 Oct 2026) found nothing, but those indexes are incomplete. Still to try: Ancestry's U.S.-to-Canada border crossings, 1908-1935 (the research thread, Next).
• Whether she and Richard ever married, or she ever divorced Morilon.
• Why they went to the Dakotas, and where the farm and "Glenavon" were.
• Her marriage to Hiram Wallace: the register (Campbell County or Sioux County), and the name she gave.