Mary Isabel Haven

Mary Isabel Haven lived only two months, but she was a real child within a close-knit farming family north of Schafer (near Watford City) in McKenzie County, North Dakota. Born in the winter of 1929–1930, Mary was the youngest member of the Haven household: daughter of Albert and Lulia Haven and baby sister to Daniel, Leland, and two-year-old Charles. Contemporary accounts list the family as active in the rural community of Schafer and the surrounding area, farming and raising livestock on their property.

Although Mary’s life was brief, she belonged to a household that, by local accounts and later historical retellings, was well established on the land. Neighbors and community members remembered the Havens as part of the fabric of rural McKenzie County in the years following World War I and into the Great Depression. The family’s home and farm would have been the center of daily life for little Mary: a place of warmth, chores, and family routines that are typical of farm life in that era.

Public records and later historical accounts make clear that Mary was a real person who had parents and siblings who cared for her. The public record about the family quickly became dominated by the disappearance and deaths that followed their last known day together on February 9, 1930, but it is important to hold in memory the human details we can verify: a mother and father, and a household that included a toddler and an infant.

There is no published family-authorized obituary located in contemporary funeral-home notices that matches Mary Isabel Haven’s name and the exact date of death; what survives in newspapers, court records, and later historical summaries are accounts of the family’s disappearance and the legal and social aftermath. Because the available sources are focused on those events, we honor Mary by centering her human place in a family and community rather than the later tragedies that touched their lives. Mary Isabel Haven should be remembered not as a headline but as a small child who belonged to a family and to rural North Dakota’s history.