August 7, 2026
Many genealogists assume that everything they need to complete a family history project is now available online. It is true that an amazing amount of information is online. That doesn’t, however, mean that everything is available there.
In the summer of 1945, my in-laws were living in Denver. My father-in-law had been serving as a flight surgeon in Europe since 1942. At the end of the European war, he was sent to Colorado to prepare for deployment to the Pacific. My mother-in-law and their young child joined him. Instead, World War II ended that summer, and my father-in-law was discharged from the Army that fall.
While the family was in Colorado, they purchased a couple of pastels by an artist named Elsie Haddon Haynes. The pictures were landscapes of Colorado mountain scenes. To my New Jersey in-laws the pictures represented a happy time in their youth. It was an interlude between the terrors of the war and their life in New Jersey. At the end of the summer, my in-laws returned to New Jersey.
The Colorado landscapes followed them. They were displayed prominently in every house my in-laws lived in. Eventually, since my husband and I live in Colorado, they came to us. Over the years, I’ve wondered about the artist who made them. She was a prolific pastel artist whose drawings were primarily of high-country Colorado.
This week I decided to see what I could find out about her. Since she was an artist, I started by googling Elsie H. Haynes (the name signed on the pictures). I quickly found a gallery bio. Elsie Haddon Rose was born in England in 1881. She died in 1963 in Colorado. She had been a WWI war bride and came to the U.S. in 1919.
From there, I used Ancestry and Family Search to check English and U.S. censuses covering her life. I found her in English censuses from 1891 until 1911 and in U.S. censuses starting in 1920 through 1950.
Online family trees on Ancestry and Family Search provided me with information about Elsie’s parents. Both of her parents were from prominent families. Elsie’s father was a well-known professor of Naval History at Cambridge. Her mother’s brother was also a professor at Cambridge. He was an anthropologist who studied in New Guinea and elsewhere. Both wrote books which are still in print.
Elsie’s other uncle, Trevor Haddon, was a prominent Victorian painter whose works are still collectable. One of his paintings recently sold for nearly $40,000.
Ancestry provided me with several copies of original documents concerning Elsie’s WWI service. She joined the women’s military and worked at a rest and recreation center in France from 1916 through 1919. While there, she met an American soldier, who she married in 1919. Documents relating to their marriage and her immigration to America are online.
Once she arrived in Colorado, documents about Elsie are sparse. However, she was an active artist from the 1920s until her death in the 1960s. Using Newspapers.com, I found many articles detailing Elsie’s presence at local art exhibits throughout Colorado.
I learned a lot about Elsie, but I could have gone further. I found hints of offline records that would be interesting to access. I found an index to English wills which listed wills for both of Elsie’s parents. The wills themselves are not online, but they can be ordered using the information from the index.
If I were related to Elsie, I’m sure that there are voluminous records at Cambridge concerning Elsie’s professor father and uncle. I imagine that there are also books and other sources of information about her artist uncle, as well.
Elsie is a known Colorado artist, and there is a collection of her work at the Special Collections section of the Denver Public Library. The Denver Art Museum also holds some of her drawings. If Elsie were my ancestor, I would visit these repositories.
I learned a lot about Elsie H. Haynes this week, but if I were serious about studying her, there are several offline sources that I’d pursue. I think this is the case for most of our ancestors. There is a good deal of information online, but there is still more to be found offline. Everything is not online.
Carol Stetser
Researcher
Larimer County Genealogical Society