So I'm working on a profile that seemed perfectly harmless (for a notable, anyway). I'm trying to connect Herman William Nickel to the main tree (because I'm working on Nickels this month). His Wikipedia entry says that William married Phyllis Fritchey, so a quick search turned up her entry in Find A Grave. (Both their names are on the same headstone, so I don't know why Find A Grave hadn't already made that connection.) A note on Phyllis' entry says that her father was Clayton Fritchey. It turns out that there's a Clayton Fritchey listed on Wikipedia, who spent a lot of time in the Washington area (Phyllis was born in Baltimore), so that matches, and Phyllis' mother's name matches the name of the first wife of Clayton Fritchey, so I think I'm on to something here.
Now Clayton's second wife, Mary Ellis "Polly" (Knowles) Wisner had previously been married to Frank Wisner, who is also listed on Wikipedia. (I've noticed before that an awful lot of notables are fairly closely connected to one another, although Wikipedia often doesn't pick up on those connections.)
But when searching for "Mary Ellis Knowles", I got a hit on Mary Davis (Ellis) Knowles' profile here on WikiTree. Now Mary Ellis was born in North Carolina, but she married William H. Knowles, who was born in Florida, and their daughter Josephine was born in Pensacola in 1889. (Mary Knowles was born in Pensacola in 1912.) Now since, in some families, it's very common to give the mother's Last Name At Birth to a child as their middle name, I can't help but wonder if there's some kind of connection between Mary (Ellis) Knowles and Mary Ellis (Knowles) Fritchey.
