July 9, 1918 - Dorothy

Problem solved.  Mary never mentions the last name of her dear friend Dorothy (Dottie), who married recently, apparently having eloped because Mary, as her best friend, was not invited to the wedding and only found out about the marriage in a letter from Dorothy.  But today Mary "went to see Mrs. Hillman.... We talked about Dottie and I sure did enjoy myself."

I wondered if Mrs. Hillman might then have been Dorothy's mother, but I could find no similar family in the 1900 or 1910 census in Philadelphia.  But there is a Heilman family including a Dorothy born in October 1898, within a year of Mary's birth.  And on rereading Mary's diary entry, in fact the family name recorded was Heilman, not Hillman, a misreading on my part.  The entry will be corrected in future printings of the book and should be immediately available in Kindle edition.

Dorothy was living with her parents and two older siblings in Philadelphia in 1900, all of whom except for Dorothy were born in Germany (consistent with later census information after Dorothy got married).  The family immigrated to the U.S. in 1894.  By 1910 Dorothy's father had died but the family was otherwise intact and still living in Philadelphia.

As noted in a previous post, within 12 years after her 1918 marriage, Dorothy and her actor husband, Joseph L. Kernan, were living apart, Dorothy living probably for the rest of her life (at least until 1940) in mental hospitals in New Jersey, the date of her death so far undetermined.