Esther Smith Gaddis O'Farrell Tapscott Mallory

Esther Gaddis Tapscott deed of sale.

During our trip to Illinois last summer Mary Frances and I picked up copies of 35 deeds for Clark County land sales involving Tapscotts. (If you would like scans drop me an email and I’ll send them to you.) We already had a large number from past trips, but these were newly uncovered.

A large number of the deeds involved mystery man Wesley Tapscott (posts of 7 Jun 2015 and 6 Aug 2015), and perhaps they will help unravel his origins.

But the deeds provided a new mystery, a mystery woman. On 17 Oct 1944 Frank Cole sold a block of land in Marshall for $1.00 to “Esther Gaddis Tapscott.” Frank was involved in real estate, abstracts, and brokering and his name appears on records for a huge number of Clark county real estate transactions. The $1.00 was undoubtedly a “nominal consideration,” widely used to keep actual considerations private. But who was Esther Gaddis Tapscott? There were very few Esthers among the Clark County Tapscotts or their spouses, and none with the middle name “Gaddis.” With a lot of labor and little luck I found who Esther Tapscott was. She was, for a short while, the wife of Omer Frank Tapscott (posting of 7 Sep 2014). I never knew that Omer had been married, but he had, briefly.

Esther May was born 17 May 1899, probably in Clark County, to Andrew Johnson and Minnie Bell (Lynn) Smith. She married four times, her last two times to Omer Tapscott and his cousin Elzia William Mallory. Since Esther had four children from her first marriage, to Robert Gaddis, she often used “Gaddis” as her middle name or, between marriages, as a surname. The details and sources are presented in my book on the Wabash Valley Tapscotts (still being written), but the marriages are synopsized in the following diagram.

Elzia Mallory and Omer Tapscott, husband number three and four, were cousins, not through the Tapscott line since Elzia was not a Tapscott by blood, but through the Mundy line. Elzia’s mother, Martha Mundy, and Omer’s mother, Sabra Mundy, were sisters.