Baby Doe Tabor of the most beautiful, flamboyant, and alluring women in the mining West". Her story inspired the opera "The Ballad of Baby Doe". Elizabeth Bonduel McCourt (or according to some accounts Elizabeth Nellis McCourt) was born in 1854 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin to Irish-Catholic immigrants Peter and Elizabeth McCourt. She later claimed to have been born in 1860. She appears to have been christened on October 7, 1854 at St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church. Called Lizzie as a child, the fourth of eleven children, she grew up in a middle-class family in a two-story house. Her father was a partner in a
Baby Doe Tabor purchasing clothing and jewelry for them. Her mother was proud that her daughter was marrying a wealthy man, and Baby Doe herself was quite happy. At her wedding in Washington, she wore a white satin dress that cost $7,000 and the $90,000 necklace known as the "Isabella" necklace. Two days after the wedding, the priest who had performed the ceremony refused to sign the marriage license when he learned that both the bride and the groom had previously divorced and that Baby Doe was a Roman Catholic. Although Tabor's contemporaries had winked at or ignored his dalliance with Baby Doe,