Isabella was the oldest child of James and Martha Dinsmore.  She was born in the Mill Creek Valley of Cincinnati in April 1830.   Isabella had fond memories of the years she spent in Louisiana, but when the family moved to their new home in the hills and woods of northern Kentucky, she found much to enjoy in the new landscape, particularly having the Ohio River so close.

At the age of sixteen, Isabella was sent to study with Margaret Coxe at a seminary for young women in Cincinnati.  The education she and her sister, Julia, received was rather rare for a female of that time; they studied algebra, geometry, mental philosophy, and rhetoric, among other subjects.  It was not until 1859 when, at the age of twenty-nine, she was married to her first cousin, Charles Flandrau.  The wedding ceremony was held in the Dinsmore parlor and was probably followed by a large dinner for family and friends on the lawn.

She and Charles moved to Minnesota where he was a prominent lawyer.  When she found she was pregnant in 1861, Isabella returned to her father’s home in Kentucky and gave birth to her daughter, Martha Macomb (“Patty”).  In 1866, she gave birth to a second daughter in Kentucky, naming her Sarah Gibson after a close friend.  When “Sally” was six months old, Isabella, who had never fully recovered from childbirth, died in Minnesota.  She was buried in the Dinsmore family graveyard in Kentucky.  Patty and Sally were brought to the farm to be raised by their Aunt Julia.  Charles went on to remarry Rebecca Blair Riddle, a widow with one son, John Wallace Riddle, Jr.,  and together they had two more children, Charles Macomb and William Blair McClure.

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