Helen Marie Blake

🏡 Childhood in Columbus & Indianapolis

Silent Years, Tender Traces
June 17, 1898 – After 1920 (date uncertain)

There are some ancestors who blaze across the family tree with brilliant stories and scandalous trails.
And then, there are those like Helen Marie Blake—quiet, half-shadowed souls who slip through the records like whispered prayers.

Born on June 17, 1898, in Columbus, Indiana, Helen entered the world on a summer’s day, the eldest daughter of Charles Arthur Blake and Mary Elizabeth Beyl. Her early years were shaped by movement and momentum—her father a wagon driver, steering his family through the working-class grit of Indianapolis’s Center Township, her mother anchoring their home with steady care.

By 1910, they lived at 910 Bates Street, and Helen, just ten, would have helped her mother with the care of her baby sister, Mary Belle Blake. It was a home likely filled with the scent of coal dust and kitchen warmth, with Charles coming home weary from oil deliveries and Mary Belle learning to toddle between the skirts of two generations of women.

💍 A Young Bride: Marriage to Irvin Smith

At 18 years old, Helen married Irvin Benjamin Smith, a 31-year-old welder who had already been married before. Their union was recorded on November 8, 1916, and for a brief time, it seemed Helen had stepped fully into her adult life—wife, homemaker, perhaps dreaming of children and a place to call their own.

🕰️ Between Two Addresses: Naomi Street & Labor Street

But marriage to Irvin may not have been what it seemed. His military draft card in 1918 listed Helen as his next of kin… but later documents began listing his mother instead, and by 1920, Helen was no longer living with him.

🍞 Working Woman: The Bakery Years

Instead, she appears at 1417 Labor Street, in the home of her uncle, Grover Thomas Beyl. Working as a packer at a baking company, likely elbow-deep in flour and fatigue, Helen’s presence there suggests a separation—or perhaps widowhood. The census calls her “married,” but Irvin’s records soon after refer to him as “widowed.”

🕯️ A Disappearance in the Records

And then… silence.
No obituary.
No gravestone I can yet trace.
Just her name—briefly and lovingly etched in the margins of other people’s stories.

Want to share a story about Helen?
We’d love to hear from you. Whether it’s a memory passed down through the generations or just a theory about her missing years, you can leave a comment or tribute on Helen Marie Blake’s Introduction Page. Help us bring her story home.

Thanks!

~Kris

🕯️ Revisited by Bones

Helen Marie Blake
Daughter of Dust and Disappearance | Packer of Bread and Memories | Lost Before Her Time

Helen Marie Blake is the kind of ancestor who reminds us that absence is also a presence. Her story is more suggestion than certainty—like a rose pressed between the pages of a book that was never finished. We don’t yet know where or how her story ends. But we do know she lived. She loved. She worked. She mattered.

And for those brief glimpses—the 1910 kitchen, the 1916 altar, the 1920 bakery floor—we remember her. We honor her. We invite you to help fill in the rest.