It would be useful to see the earliest reference to Mrs J Caldwell bracketed with Brown and Connor, which might pinpoint when she married or started calling herself Mrs Caldwell.
If Janet did marry, was Ivy her birth daughter (born before or after marriage) or her stepdaughter? Ivy may have arrived in the USA with her birth mother, possibly the first Mrs Caldwell? Assuming Ivy was born in England. Presumably Ivy had papers showing she was born in England, or were people’s info just taken on their word? She probably didn’t need a birth cert when marrying Robert Goodman. She could pretty much say what she wanted for a census as long as it matched what she’d told her husbands. The husbands might have given all the family info to the enumerator anyway. And with the US censuses being sealed for 70 odd years, no-one would know or care (except us!) about inaccuracies.
With another family I was tracing in England, they’d gone to extraordinary effort to disguise themselves. Why as no-one would see it for 100 years? Did they think the enumerator would know and tell the neighbours or the newspapers? The man had a wife elsewhere and the marriage must have broken down between two censuses. He and his new partner were listed with amended names, ages, places of birth and occupation. The clue was the children including a son of his and his wife. If the man hadn’t died soon after, the link between his real name, the census address, and his partner wouldn’t have been on record. I posted it all on Wikipaedia as he was a famous-ish artist John Cheltenham Wake with the original entry limited and erroneous. It was luck really as their youngest child’s school admission showed an address plus mother’s name that confirmed it.
Perhaps a bit of lucky recording of info will lead us to Ivy’s origins.
