No pictures of Sena are known.
Sena B. Thompson was born in Illinois in 1874 and at some point in the late 1880s moved with her parents to St. Paul, Minnesota.
One of seven children, she was raised on her father’s farm in Hennepin County, Minnesota. See the 1895 MN Census below.
In 1900, according to that year’s federal census (below), she was 26 and working as a “Dining Room Girl” (i.e., waitress) in Tracy, Minnesota, 150 miles southwest of St. Paul, not far from the South Dakota border where Grandpa O’Donnell had spent time.
She married James O’Donnell, Sr on November 27, 1900, in St. Paul. Their marriage record is above. It’s worth mentioning that Sena was living and working in Tracy when she was enumerated for the 1900 census in June of that year. Five months later she was back in St. Paul and marrying James O’Donnell.
They were still living in St. Paul for the 1905 Minnesota and 1910 U.S. censuses. In both, however, Sena takes a few liberties with how old she was. Instead of giving her birth as 1874, the same year as her husband, she made herself out to be three years younger than he, born in 1877. At least she was fairly consistent in the misrepresentation, unlike the Guiney sisters, who gave markedly different birth years to census takers without reason or even plausibility.
Sena wasn’t entirely consistent, though. In 1900 she describes her father as having been born in Norway, but in the 1905 Minnesota census she says he was born in England, and for the 1910 U.S. census, that Illinois was his birthplace. In both of the last two documents Sena’s mother is accurately said to have been born in Norway. If simple vanity or seemliness comes to mind as the reason for making herself younger than her husband, the reason for the changes to her father’s birthplace is perplexing.
They had no children.
Sena died of unknown causes on December 27, 1912, age 38, a year or two after moving to Milwaukee with Grandpa O’Donnell. She is buried in the James O’Donnell family plot at Holy Cross Cemetery with her husband and his second wife, Margaret McIntyre O’Donnell, Dad’s mother.