The Proeger Family · Generation 4 — Earl's great-grandparents and their siblings
Frances Bowles
Probable daughter of William Anderson Bowles · Mrs. Fathergail
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Person · Frances Bowles
The record
- HHomethe fan · what changed · open questions
- MMigrationbirths and deaths on a map, by decade
- TTimeline837 entries · 5 eras
- PPeople391 people, by generationFrances Bowles
- LLines13 surname pages
The evidence
The findings
How to read this record
Every claim is tagged
Most family trees flatten everything into the same confident typeface. This one does not. The three research tags below are the whole point of the exercise: they say what a document proves, what the weight of evidence suggests, and what nobody has found yet. A fourth marks what the family stated directly, where no document has been retrieved at all — it is kept separate on purpose and is never quietly promoted to confirmed. A fifth, added on 13 September 2026, marks biological evidence: a DNA result is not a document, and it is not testimony either. Two further labels mark where this page withholds information rather than lacking it.
Attested by a document that was actually retrieved and read — a census sheet, a government index, a grave marker, a family-written obituary.
Strongly supported but not nailed down: a user-contributed tree, a masked index field, or a chain of consistent circumstances. Believable, not proven.
Searched for and not located. This is a statement about the search, not about the person — the record may well exist somewhere unsearched.
Supplied by the family and recorded on their word — no document has been retrieved for it. Note the diamond rather than the dot: this is provenance, not proof, and it stands apart from the three record tags above S24.
Biological evidence consistent with a claim. It corroborates origins; it does not by itself establish a person or a link. Note the bar rather than a dot or a diamond: no DNA result on this page is ever counted as confirmed, because no document was read for it S46.
The person is living. By the privacy rule for this page, name and relationship are shown, and at most a year the family has already published. Full dates of birth, ages, places of residence and record identifiers are held back.
A branch that is actively being worked on. The node exists in the structure so the shape of the family is honest; the detail is simply not in yet.
Frances Bowles
ProbableProbable daughter of William Anderson Bowles · Mrs. Fathergail
- Parents
- William Anderson Bowles & Iona Belle Brock
- Sources
- 2
Research status
Evidence: Two entries in an index of newspaper obituaries list Frances Fathergail as a survivor of her mother, Iona Belle Bowles, in 1947 and as a sister of S. A. Bowles in 1964 (S1663). Weak or missing: Both are machine-made index entries and neither clipping was read for her name; the papers give only “Frances”; no birth, marriage or death record of hers has been read, and no dates are known. Not yet confirmed. Know more? Confirm or correct this →
Open questions what is probable, weak or missing — confirm or correct it
Frances Bowles · Sources
Citations
Sources cited on this card
2 of the record's sources are cited here. The numbering is the record's own; the full list, with where else each is cited, is at Sources.
- S1632Obituary of Mrs. Iona Belle Bowles — Abilene Reporter-News, 5 July 1947, p. 1; burial report 8 July 1947, p. 5. Newspapers.com pages 761535105 and 761535181. Read from the newspaper text (OCR); the page images are not yet read by eye. Died Friday 4 July at the home of her son John W. Bowles near Potosi; born 31 December 1865 near London, Kentucky; married 24 December 1880 at Taft, Arkansas; to Taylor County in 1892. Names nine daughters, six sons, one brother (John Brock, Louisiana) and three sisters (Ada Estes, Mary Stansburry, Ida Stansburry). No parent is named.
- S1663Newspapers.com Obituary Index — two entries naming Frances Fathergail, Abilene Reporter-News, 5 July 1947 and 3 June 1964. Ancestry records 891865732 and 958498523, index entries read on 2 October 2026; neither clipping was read for these entries. 1947: obituary of Iona Belle Bowles; Frances Fathergail is listed as a survivor, with Iona Belle Bowles as her mother. 1964: obituary of S. A. Bowles; Frances Fathergail is listed as his sister. The entries are extracted from the newspaper text by machine. The 1947 obituary is the one cited as [S1632].
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