We have learned that the elderly lady who was looked after by Herbert and Hattie Stetson was the older half-sister of Hattie's mother. She had been born in 1800 as Ruth Putnam Haskell but was known now as Ruth P. Brooks. But we didn't know who Brooks was or the circumstances of her remarriage. 

Martha Haskell was Harriet Smith's mother, thus Isetta's grandmother. It is wonderful to find this photograph of her on a Find-a-Grave page, along with a headstone image and data about her burial. 

She died at age 50 in 1872. She is buried with other Haskell family members at Brownwood Cemetery in North Bloomfield, Trumbull County, Ohio. 

Here is a biography of Thomas Nelson Haskell from Find-a-Grave. 

The most famous of the 15 children of Captain George Henry Haskell was the second youngest, Thomas Nelson Haskell, who among other accomplishments was a founder of Colorado College. 

In that college's Tutt Library Special Collections are his collected papers. 

Just as earlier generations of the Haskell family had migrated from Massachusetts to Vermont and then to western New York and Ohio, the young Haskells in the 1840s were staking out opportunities in the newly established territory of Iowa. 

We've seen how Ruth P. Haskell, later Daggett and Brooks, ended up in a small town 30 miles west of Dubuque, the Mississippi river city that was a gateway to the Iowa Territory. 

The thing I didn't know about the War of 1812 is that it mainly happened in 1814, at least in New England, when British fleets menaced the Maine coast and occupied territory east of the Penobscot. This explains why George Haskell was not with the Massachusetts militia in 1812, when he was otherwise engaged in burying one wife and marrying another.