Ella Trumbo — Ed Haley’s future wife — was born in February of 1888, roughly a year after the feud’s conclusion. She was born with “runny eyes” but went blind after a doctor prescribed “bad medicine.” When the drops were put into Ella’s eyes, the family ignored her crying because they thought she was acting out with what Pat Haley called “the Trumbo temper.” Thereafter, she fell on two separate occasions, losing an eye each time. Mona said her eyes actually “burst one at a time,” leaving her face with empty sockets. Ella told Mona that all she remembered seeing was “the light of day.” Supposedly, Jesse James once stopped at her father’s vegetable stand in Morehead and gave her money because she was a little blind girl.

Some time between 1893 and 1899, Laura Belle Trumbo died, leaving a great void in Ella’s life. The situation was complicated when her father remarried to a woman named Nannie around 1899. Nannie, or Nan, as she was called, was born in April of 1878 — making her barely older than William’s oldest child, Zora. Ella did not like her stepmother, Pat said, because she was really close to her father. She found comfort among her friends at the Kentucky School for the Blind, which she attended from the age of about four years until she was nineteen or twenty years old.

In 1900, the Trumbos were listed as renters in the 1900 Rowan County Census (Morehead Precinct): William was a thirty-eight-year-old farmer, Nannie was twenty-two, Zora was twenty-one, Texas Anna was fifteen, Ella was twelve, Allie was nine and Luther was several months old. Zora worked as a day laborer, while Texas Anna and Ella attended school. All could read and write except the youngest two children.

Thomas Trumbo — Ella’s grandfather — died in October of 1909 and was buried on Triplett Creek.

“Thomas Trumbo was buried on a point overlooking his property, a place he had chosen because it was where the morning light first struck,” according to one local history.

A year later, in 1910, William Trumbo was listed in the Rowan County census (Morehead Precinct #1). William was a fifty-eight-year-old farmer, Nannie was thirty-two years old, Ella was a twenty-one-year-old blind music teacher, Allie W. was an 18-year-old working at odd jobs, and Luther was sixteen years old. William’s mother, Celia, was listed in the home as seventy-two years old, with five of her seven children alive. Willie A. Campbell, a forty-six year old widow, was listed in the home as a ward. All could read and write. Celia died four years later on January 13 or 14, 1914 and was buried beside of her husband on Triplett Creek.

By 1920, William had left Morehead and settled at Clyffeside Park in Ashland, where he was listed in a city directory as an employee of the Vansant-Kitchen Company. “In the timber-boom era of the 1880s to the early 1900s, Ashland and the immediate vicinity had several saw mills, among them the famous Vansant-Kitchen Mill,” wrote one early history. “Located at Keyes Creek, this mill depended principally on the river for bringing the timber from the forests to Ashland. It made use in the early days also of the splash-dam system of floating logs down Keyes Creek, but as the timber in that area became harder to reach, the system no longer worked well and a narrow-gauge railway was built up the creek to haul the timber from the jobs far up the hollows.”

Following William’s death, Nan remarried to a Brewer.