Mary Elizabeth Collins

Polly Collins Bruner (1827-1887), wife of Eli Woodruff Bruner. Molata is her story: the photograph shows the darker complexion the family remembered, and the DNA of her descendants bears out the “Molata” of the colonial records. The same photograph as printed in the 1997 Brunner/Bruner Picnic book, with its caption, is here.

The same photograph of Mary Elizabeth “Polly” Collins as the family’s copy, here as printed, in an embossed frame with the typed caption “Mary Elizabeth ‘Polly’ Collins Bruner.” The book is a 1997 family history made for a Brunner/Bruner picnic. The portrait of her husband Eli in the family’s printed copy is captioned in the same typewriter face, so is probably from the same book. The foot of the page is cut off in the screenshot.

A log house with a deep porch overgrown with vines, an older woman in a white apron seated on the steps and a man in a dark suit standing beside her. Captioned on Ancestry “Eli Woodruff Bruner & Polly’s House in Arkansas.” Polly was living in Benton County, Arkansas, in 1880, a widow; Eli had died in Colorado in 1879. The couple on the porch are not named, and when it was taken is not known.

The country in 1847, with its canals, railroads and stage routes, insets of Oregon and the cities, and the counties’ populations from the census of 1840. Iowa had become a state only the December before, and the Collinses and Bruners were gathering in Appanoose County on its Missouri line. From Molata, chapter eight.

The eastern half of the family’s road, 1694-1827: the Collins line from Orange and Louisa counties and the Flat River, the Reeds from Surry County and the Rowan settlements, through the New River country to Clay County, Kentucky, where Jesse Collins and Mary Reed married in 1827. From Molata.

The whole road, 1694-1887: from Tidewater Virginia through Clay County to Indiana, Iowa, Missouri and Arkansas, with Bradley Collins’s flatboat of 1839, and an inset of the last legs to Colorado and Puget Sound. From Molata.