The internet, as usual, perpetuates a lot of errors, and makes up its own new ones. With the writer "Francis Stevens" one hardly knows where to begin correcting the errors. First, there is her name. She was born "Gertrude M. Barrows" (the M. is sometimes claimed to have been Mabel, but this is unconfirmed, as the state of Minnesota, and the county in which she was born, do not have birth records going back that far; yet in the 1895 Minnesota Census she appears with her family as "Myrtle"--which would seemingly be her middle-name, as she was perhaps known familiarly). Her first published story in 1904 was signed "G.M. Barrows." She married in 1908, a man surnamed Bennett who died in 1910. She published all of the rest of her stories between 1917 and 1923, under the byline "Francis Stevens." During this time she was known as Gertrude Bennett. A decade after she ceased writing, she married a man surnamed Gaster, and was known as Gertrude Gaster for the rest of her life (she died in 1948). But the internet has renamed her "Gertrude Barrows Bennett." not a form of her name that she used. Similarly, modernity knows Poe as "Edgar Allan Poe"--not by the name "Edgar A. Poe" with which he signed his writings.
Barrows's birthyear is also mistakenly given as 1884, the year she herself gave out in later life. But early census records make it clear she was born in 1883.
And currently, there is a a supposed photograph of her that comes up when you search google for "Gertrude Barrows Bennett." Only it's not her.
Here is the erroneous photograph. The earliest appearance of it I can find on the web comes from 2018 in a twitter post here (the twitter thread contains other poppycock).
 | |
| Not "Francis Stevens" |
Here is the writer "Francis Stevens"--in detail from a 1927 photograph, one of the few of her that passed on to her grandchildren.
 |
| The real "Francis Stevens" in 1927 |
