Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Which Ancestor Married the Most Times?

Extremes in our family are what we're looking for this week in Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun.

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

1.  Which ancestor of yours married the most times?  (This may be interesting for some geneabloggers!)

2.  Share about which ancestors married the most times 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!]

Well, Randy mentioned that there doesn't seem to be a way to easily determine this information from within Family Tree Maker, my family tree database of choice, so I'm going to believe him.  That means I will be working from memory.

I can immediately think of four men in my family tree who were married three times each:  my father, my stepfather, my paternal grandfather, and someone way back on the Sellers line (two of his wives were named Barbara).  My stepfather doesn't really count as an ancestor, and the Sellers man in question is on my informal adoptive line, so that kind of rules them both out.  I would count my grandfather as the most, because in addition to three marriages, for about 17 years he lived with my grandmother as though they were married.

So that means Bertram Lynn Sellers, Sr. (1903–1995) is probably the winner of this particular sweepstakes.  I don't believe that my aunts from his first marriage considered my grandmother as their stepmother, but they called her Mother Ann.  I know neither they nor my father thought of the second or third wives as stepmothers.  And I'm pretty sure my Aunt Carol did not think of the third and final wife as her stepmother (though I could be wrong about that).  So three marriages, one informal liaison (even though my grandmother used the surname Sellers for the rest of her life), and no stepmothers!

If, however, we were to investigate beyond ancestors and look at collateral relatives, there are additional contenders.  Three of my cousins on my father's side have each been married four times.  One aunt has been married four times.  One of my grandmother's younger brothers had four relationships that produced children (all daughters!); I'm not sure how many times he actually married, however.

But one cousin on my grandmother's long, storied, originally Quaker line was married four times that I have documented, plus he had a child by someone other than his wife while he was still married.  And based on what I have found about him so far, I would not be surprised if there were more marriages and more children.

Now, this is all on my father's side of the family.  On my mother's side, I know of only one cousin who has been married three times.

And I'll also thank Linda Stufflebean for suggesting this topic.  This was fun!