hi danny,
thank you for the response and the info. john blake was in the spanish american war...i don't even know when or where it was...he was a corporal. mary blake was a nurse. i believe she joined the army,in a program recruiting women to be nurses. i think she was sent to a military hospital in portland,oregon, that is why they moved. she was a corporal, too. but eliz, a researcher,says she would not have been a cpl...if she was a nurse.
i don't know anything about the military. you are really good in research to find all this info. it took me weeks, looking every day. i saw she was born in kentucky. kentucky has no vital records to look at. i have tried looking at every census,and the neighbors living near any fords, workmans, blankenships, but i only found one blake and it was not john, maybe his brother...? i can't find his mother or father. but that is not going very well. i do not know her maiden name. i can not find a marriage record. do you think they could have been married by an army chaplain, and no record posted for which ever state/county it was...?
she is not a relative, as far as i know. but, she was close with my grandmother alice delilah 'workman', b.1866, wv. i can't trace her, either.[alice delilah is a ford by birth, her mother remarried and alice used the workman name to the day she married my grandfather, wm francis butler]
family story says she got married, moved to oregon and became a nurse. and she had no children. [but she had ervin...who died young, i am looking, but he must have not had any children]. mary blake had a woman come and stay with her at her home the last two or three years of her life, leaving her home and all her possessions to this woman.but, alice delilah's mother, dulcena lucinda roberts, was born in kentucky and had a lot of relatives...mary blake could be related that way. thank you. jane