Edith was born on September 24, 1895 in Wakefield, Massachusetts. Her father was Frederick Hiatt and her mother was Elizabeth V. Harper. She had two brothers, Albert and Frank, and a sister, Ruth, who she was very close with. Edith later married Philip Duncan Stevens.
Born in Wakefield
Each year the town of Wakefield printed a list of the births registered there in its annual report. The list for 1895 includes Edith:
Sept. 24 Edith Kingdon Hiatt, Female, Fred'k W. and Elizabeth (Harper), Bookkeeper.
The last column is the occupation of the father, so in 1895 Fred Hiatt was a bookkeeper. The printed list was copied from the town clerk's register, so it is derivative. Edith's birth was also recorded with the state, and the Massachusetts Archives holds that record in volume 449, page 434. The information about the birth was probably given by a parent soon after it happened.
Edith's mother, Elizabeth V. Harper, was born in Wakefield on August 14, 1872. She married Frederick Hiatt in Boston on November 4, 1893, and was 23 when Edith was born.
Where did "Kingdon" come from?
It may have been taken from the actress Edith Kingdon, who was famous on the stage in the 1880s and married the millionaire George J. Gould in 1886, and whose name was well known when Edith was born. This is only a guess, and nothing has been found to prove it.
Stark Avenue
The Hiatts lived on Stark Avenue in Wakefield. A newspaper item of June 1898 gives their address as No. 4 Stark Avenue. In the town's list of polls and estates for 1895, "Hyatt, Fred W., Stark ave." was taxed only for his poll, $2.00, so he owned no property in his own name. Wakefield's lists of persons assessed for poll taxes in 1896, 1897 and 1898 also show Fred W. Hyatt on Stark Avenue, with his age given as 32, 33 and 34. That would put his birth about 1864. The ages were gathered by the assessors, so they are indirect evidence of his birth year and could be off by a year. In 1896 he is called a book-keeper, and a star by his name shows he had lived at the same place the year before.
The house the Hiatts lived in seems to have belonged to Elizabeth's family. The same 1895 list taxed her father, Henry Harper of 44 Nahant Street, for several houses, among them a "dwelling house, Stark ave., 650; shed, 40." Arthur Harper lived on Stark Avenue too, where he owned an unfinished house and several lots, and Jessie M. Harper owned lot 41 of the "Harper Plan." The street seems to have been laid out on Harper land.
By 1899 a dwelling worth $650 and a shed worth $40 on Stark Avenue were assessed to Elizabeth Hyatt, on lot 126 of plat 19, about 6,500 square feet of land. The values are the same as Henry Harper's Stark Avenue house in 1895. That suggests it was the same house, and that it passed from Henry Harper to his daughter Elizabeth. The same 1899 list taxes "Harper, Arthur, Heirs," so Arthur Harper had died by then.
In 1903, after the town bought the Wakefield water works, it finished laying a two-inch water pipe on Stark Avenue. Fred Hiatt's house was one of the three new water services made from it. Carrie F. Harper, the widow of Elizabeth's brother Arthur, got her water service from the same pipe. Edith grew up near her mother's relatives, and her cousin Marion Harper, Arthur and Carrie's daughter, appears with her in several of the photographs below.
Photographs
He died before they could be married.
