Izetta Jewel, 1883-1978

Izetta Jewel was born Izetta Jewel Kenney in Hackettstown, New Jersey in 1883 to Elizabeth Henrietta (Denno) Kenney and Cornelius C. Kenney. Her mother was a suffragist and painter, for a short time offering art classes. Her father was a trained photographer who spent little time with the family, traveling throughout the United States and Mexico in an attempt to make his fortune until his accidental death in 1906 when he was hit by a train. Izetta Jewel had one sister, Hazel May Kenney, and a half-sister and half-brother, Bertha Church and Everett Church Jr., who were the product of her mother's previous marriage to Everett L. Church. Having been a young child when her biological parents divorced and her biological father being unknown to her, Bertha assumed the surname Kenney. It is unclear whether she was ever officially adopted by her step-father or whether she was informed of her true descent. Everett L. Church Jr. died as a young man.

As a child, Izetta attended private schools: Pamlico in Pompton, New Jersey, and East Greenwich Academy in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, until she began her training at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City. She made her first stage appearance in the play Tess in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1900. She continued her stage work, traveling around the country making notable performances in New York, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon, and joining various stock companies, among them the Castle Theater Stock Company in Boston, Massachusetts, until she arrived in Washington, D. C., and met and married William G. Brown Jr., a wealthy West Virginia congressman, in 1914. Following their marriage, the couple settled at Brown's estate in Kingswood, West Virginia. The couple had one child, Izetta "June" Brown, who was born just weeks before William G. Brown Jr.'s sudden death in March 1916.

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