> Ran across an interesting article in my local paper...Methow Valley News, > Okanogan Co., WA... > Item taken from a book "Isabella Stewart Gardner and Penway Court" by Morris > Carter, published 1925. The subject, a popular socialite of Boston, is a > trustee of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. ================= Susan, This is just a little story. I'm not related to the Boston Gardners, but from 1968-70 I rented a house from Isabella Gardner (Tate) in Minneapolis. This younger Isabella was the daughter of the renowned Boston Isabella. A poet, she had married Allen Tate, at the time one of the most noted poets and critics in the United States and a professor at the University of Minnesota. When they divorced she rented her house, which she could not bear to give up, to a young poet friend of hers and mine, Roland Flint, and when he moved on to Georgetown University she rented to me. She died in the 1970s. Last fall I was in Boston and by chance came across the Gardner family mausoleum while visiting a Boston cemetery with my son. Two older women came along and let themselves into the mausoleum. Both were near replicas of the younger Isabella Gardner Tate so I suppose they were sisters or cousins. It was a nice coincidence. If there is a point to this I suppose it's that genealogy groups turn up surprising connections beyond the family connections we all look for. My Gardners are all southern and, in truth, I hadn't thought of Isabella as a Gardner for some years, certainly not as a relative--which of course she wasn't. Charles Norman