So where do we go from there? I started to wonder how an adoption could go undocumented, and I supposed that it was probably because somebody knew somebody else. In other words, this Mrs. Steadman may have known the mother of the baby. Maybe it was even a member of her own extended family.

After thinking about that, I went to www.familysearch.org and looked up the Wardle family. I found that Martha (born 1864) had five sisters:

Eliza, born 1856
Mary Elizabeth, born 1861
Fannie Maria, born 1871
Emily Jane, born 1876
Catherine Louisa, born 1878

Eliza died in 1859 at age 3. Mary Elizabeth married John Berkin Smith in 1878, so she had been married for 16 years by the time Stella was born. She was not a likely candidate. Fannie Maria married Charles Steadman in 1889, so she was also married. Emily Jane also died young in 1886 at the age of 12.

That leaves Catherine Louisa, who in 1894 would have been 16 years old. Could she have been Stella's mother? Could she have become pregnant out of wedlock and been pressured to give up her baby? I have no evidence to conclude that, but she seems the most likely candidate I have found so far.

I wish I knew more about her. I wish she had descendants who I could contact, but she died in 1905. Interestingly, she had married someone named Nephi Jensen only two years earlier.

Searching for Stella