Fun Facts is the topic for week 29 of 52 Ancestors in 52 weeks. I learned a fun fact earlier this year on one of my Maine genealogy groups that cleared up some confusion on my family tree. I noticed that a few of my ancestors travelled from Maine to New Hampshire to get married, and I didn’t understand why. It seemed like an awfully long distance to go when most people chose to get married in their hometowns.
I learned there were a couple significant reasons people would travel across the border to tie the knot. In the “Live Free or Die” state, couples could marry as young as 13. New Hampshire also didn’t have a mandatory waiting period – you could get married the same day. Most states had mandatory waiting periods because they required blood tests for venereal diseases like syphilis, which caused birth defects and deaths in infants. If you were unmarried and pregnant, waiting for blood test results only further delayed your marriage, and increased the odds of people knowing your child was illegitimate. As penicillin became more widely available, states realized premarital blood tests were no longer necessary or cost-effective. Most states stopped requiring such tests by the mid-1980s. If your ancestors are from Maine or other states that border New Hampshire, some of them may have travelled there to get married for one of these reasons.
Everyone in my family was surprised when I discovered that my great-grandfather, Dana Lewis Ladd, was divorced before he married my great-grandmother, Blanche. Dana married his first wife, Julia Peterson, on August 15, 1910. Dana was 20 and Julia 19 when they travelled from Westbrook, Maine to Berlin, New Hampshire to wed. Six months later, on February 22, 1911, Julia gave birth to a little boy. No first name was given on the birth certificate, and although I’ve been unable to locate a death certificate, I believe he died in early infancy. Dana divorced Julia for “cruel and abusive treatment” in 1912. Though society is now beginning to recognize women can be the abusers in relationships, I bet a man seeking a divorce on those grounds was unusual in 1912. Based on Julia’s marital history, I’m going to assume she was indeed a difficult person. She married twice more after her divorce from Dana. Her second marriage also took place in New Hampshire and ended in divorce.
My grandparents Helen Ladd and Frederick Wagner Turner also lived in Maine and married in New Hampshire. They married in Ossipee, New Hampshire on June 30, 1945. Their eldest son was born in 1947, so unless my grandmother had an early miscarriage we are unaware of, she wasn’t pregnant when she married. I think a more likely explanation can be found in the stack of love letters my grandfather Fred sent to my grandmother Helen. Fred, who was divorced, in his mid-thirties, and eleven years Helen’s senior, wanted to settle down. Helen didn’t. She enjoyed flirting, dancing, working at the paper mill, and her freedom. There are many love letters from several men prior to my grandfather who also begged and pleaded her to choose them, settle down, and start a family. What I wouldn’t give for her letters so I could read her side of the story! She provoked many angry responses from her suitors when she refused to commit solely to them. I say good for her! I’m proud of my grandmother for knowing herself and not caving into societal conventions of the time. Anyway, my grandfather was crazy in love with her. I think he finally wore her down (if it’s one thing Turners are good at, it’s crafting a strong argument and then wearing people down with it) and once she said yes, he didn’t want to risk waiting in case she got cold feet and changed her mind. They got engaged in March, but I bet she dragged her feet setting a date, and Fred probably said, "Let's go!" one weekend. There are no pictures from the wedding, and if it was a planned event rather than a spontaneous one, the family would have been there. My grandmother was especially close to her mother and sister. Fred somehow managed to whisk her across the border to lovely Ossipee, a serene lake town, where he finally put a ring on Helen’s finger.
This knowledge about New Hampshire’s lax marriage laws allows us to put genealogical facts into context. It helps answer the “why?” If you have people in your tree who weren’t from New Hampshire, but married there, check out the dates. Were they too young to get married in their home state? Did a baby arrive less than nine months after the wedding? Are you fortunate enough to have a stack of love letters like I do that shows one or both members of the couple were so madly in love that they absolutely couldn’t deal with the mandatory waiting period? Putting the facts into context in this way makes our ancestors’ stories relatable and more relevant.
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