Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Share Something Unexpected That You've Found While Researching an Ancestor

As for Randy Seaver's topic for tonight's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, if a genealogist has never found something unexpected while researching an ancestor, I'd say that genealogist hasn't done enough research.

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision. 

1.  Share something unexpected that you've found while researching an ancestor.

2.  Share about your unexpected something in your own blog post or on your Facebook page.  Be sure to leave a link to your report in a comment on this post.

[Thank you to Linda Stufflebean for suggesting this topic!]

One major fact that I discovered wasn't quite unexpected, so I guess you could say I merely confirmed it.

I was told by my cousin Ruth Anne that the rumor in the family was that my paternal grandparents had never actually been married.  This was strongly supported by a letter she had that was from a lawyer, in response to an inquiry my grandmother (who was also Ruth Anne's grandmother) had sent to him.  It was clear from the letter we had that our grandmother had asked about circumstances relating to a common-law marriage.  Now, that is not something you ask if you know that you signed a marriage license.

But the confirmation that they had not been married came when Ancestry.com added a database of an index to Florida divorces.

I was sitting around in an airport during a layover and discovered the database.  I figured it would be amusing to look up my father's and my grandfather's divorces.  And lo and behold, when my grandfather was divorced in 1953, it was from Elizabeth, his first wife, whom he married in the 1920's — not from Anna, my grandmother.  My father was born in 1935.  Oops!

So I called my father and said, "Guess what?  You're a bastard!"  Which he thought was hilarious.

(And yes, I realize that the possibility exists that my grandfather could have told my grandmother he wasn't married and entered into a bigamous marriage, but they lived in a pretty small town, and I'll bet that my grandmother knew his first wife and knew that he was still married.)

I did discover something unexpected about my great-great-grandfather on my mother's side, however.

I had been told by cousins that my great-great-grandmother had died while the family was still in Europe and that my great-great-grandfather had remarried, which made sense, because they had very young children when she passed away.  It's certainly common for men to do that, so they have a wife to take care of those children.

I found the record for my great-great-grandmother's death on December 8, 1908.  But when I found an index entry for my great-great-grandfather's second marriage, I learned that it had taken place June 8, 1911, two and a half years after my great-great-grandmother had died.

Um, say what?  You mean to tell me that he took care of those babies (including one who was a mere one month old when mom died) all by himself for those years?

So I asked my cousins about this apparent "modern man", taking on the mantle of mother while he was also a businessman.

And learned that no, he had not been the one taking care of the children.  The oldest daughter in the family, who was about 18 when her mother died, was still living at home, and she was the person taking care of those little ones.  My great-great-grandfather only remarried after Etta married and moved out.  While that's not quite what I was told the first time around, it certainly made that second marriage date make much more sense.