Apparently Isaac Coles had an interest in botany, as evidenced by this 1880s entry in an unidentified journal. His vocation as a surveyor would have made such observations very convenient.
From "Glen Cove - Images of America" (by Joan Harrison, 2008); Thomas Hewlett Coles (1851-1896) was the eldest of the five children of Thomas Coles and Mary G Willets. Of Quaker upbringing, he married the Quaker daughter of Philadelphia doctor Seth Pancoast and (the late) Sarah Saunders Osborne on 9-Oct-1888. Thomas and Sallie had one child, Mary Gertrude (1894-1982), who married Stanley Justus Donaldson at Dr. Pancoast's Ardmore, PA home on 9-Feb-1921. From longislandgenealogy.com. 'Deaths Reported by the Long Islander, 1891-1900': "COLES Thomas Hewlett, 44 years; d. 9 August 1896 after a long illness; son of Isaac Coles; husband of Sallie Pancoast; son-in-law of the late Dr. Seth Pancoast of Philadelphia, Pa.; father of Gertrude Coles; A well known in Philadelphia and New York as well as on Long Island; member of the Society of Friends; Glen Cove item". This dispels a notion I had about my grandmother's name. I thought she took to "Gertrude" only once she was an adult, but it's clear here that's what she was being called when just two years old.
