Ellen was born January 8, 1865 in South Columbia, New York, about 200 miles from New York City. She was shy and delicate and loved to draw and illustrate. Her young life was very uneventful but filled with her art which, until her death, expressed an innocence and joy of life that a sense of child-like happiness emitted from her deep within. Ellen graduated from Richfield Springs Seminary, New York, in1882 and followed with a couple of years at the Cooper Institute in New York City for art training. Then she returned home and placed an ad in the local paper announcing she was offering painting lessons in her home at South Columbia. When Ellen's father, Dean, died in 1891, Ellen and her mother moved in with an aunt in Richfield Springs. She spent her next 14 years teaching art lessons to people. Ellen started doing illustrations, landscapes, portraits, and some free lance work through the mail. International Art Company purchased several of her designs. After the purchase and use of several of Ellen's designs, International Art offered Ellen a paid two year trip abroad for her and her mother. There she would study and refine her art talents at the parent company and be closer to the actual manufacturer of paper goods. It would be the Wolf Company, an outlet for International Art, that would hire her when she got to New York around 1906 . That's when her post cards first began to be published and exclusively by Wolf. Few women were hired as full time illustrators during this period. Ellen began producing post cards under Wolf's name and became their sole artist and designer. Ellen was forty years when she accepted the full time position with Wolf Company. She had been free lancing for International Art, along with several other artists, for six years. During the eight years with Wolf, her success had reached such a peak that there seemed to be no limit to the growth potential for her, the company, or the post card industry. Ellen invested heavily into German post card industries upon the advise of the Wolf brothers who did the same. The company was doing so well they sent her to Germany to work with the their engravers. In August, 1914, Ellen was in Germany and got caught up in the outbreak of World War 1. Factories were burned, records destroyed, and messages never received. It wasn't long before she became a displaced person, penniless and alone in a foreign land.