Researching my family has inspired me to write a story loosly based on them. My great great grandmother came to the city where she was a maid in various houses. Census records only show her living in the houses of her employers (with the exception of the year that she moved to the city and stayed in a boarding house). Next thing you know, she has a kid and the kid's last name is the same as the son of the boarding house owners (my great great grandfather). They have another kid a few years later even after she's no longer living at the boarding house. Eventually, her name changes on the census record to a variant spelling of the man's last name. There is no marriage record of the two. There are no census records of them ever living together after the year at the boarding house. Census records show that he lived at the boarding house until his early death (during the influenza epidemic that also wiped out his family that owned the boarding house). Census records show that she lived in various residences. there were no census records of where her children went (a recording from my Great grandfather explains that it was because she hid them in the houses she worked at, sometimes in the attic, sometimes in the basement). My question is.... how/why did she have her name legally changed to my G-G-Grandfather's last name without a marriage record? could people elope back then? Wasn't it taboo to have children or any kind of sexual relationship outside of marriage? Why couldn't they get married? how is the name change legit? For the record, i'm not looking to answer why/how there are no record of marriage between my GGGrands. Rather, I'm looking for a way to explain it in the story I base off of them: -Girl from the rural south moves to the city and boards with a family -she takes jobs as a nanny to put herself through night school -romance with one of the boarders that gets her kicked out of the boarding house -they continue seeing each other and have a secret family -until he dies in 1919 during the violence of the Red Summer
I've done a fair amount of genealogy research of my own family so I'll take a stab at what might have happened. While it was more standard to have some sort of wedding, it wasn't like today where you have to get a marriage license. It was not uncommon to have common-law marriages where if you lived together for a certain amount of years, the state would consider you married for census purposes. It is quite probable that your G-G-Grandmother lived at the boarding house, met the owner's son and for love or convenience they had a relationship, met the state's threshold for common-law marriage and she started using his last name. My own great-uncle who was around when I was a kid, had a common-law wife. Some states still have these laws on the books, although they don't really enforce them that much theses days.
I'd say most of the records at that time depended on whichever jabroni was writing them at the clerks office. Probably not a lot of vetting, fact-checking, and supervision. And I doubt it would hard to forge/revise is somebody was so inclined. The door behind which they were kept might not have even been locked. I'd look into whatever authority regulated "legal" marriage, and to what degree that was tied into the prevalent church authority. Those cats had enormous power depending on the community.
We're so used to having to show identification for every damn thing we do that we can't imagine the laxness of record keeping in past decades. I was a census enumerator in 1980. We didn't ask people for proof of identity, but took them at their word re: their names, marital status, and other statistics. In earlier censuses, only people present at each residence at the time of the census taker's visit were counted. This led to some people being counted twice in different residences and some people being missed all together. I found my multi-great grandparents in an old census because their daughter was counted both in her own residence and in theirs. Common law marriage was, um, common. After holding forth as a married couple for a period of time, a couple's marriage was legal and could only be ended via a legal divorce. However, it wasn't unheard of for one or the other members of the couple (legal or common-law) to disappear, never to be heard of again, leaving the other spouse to eventually remarry after listing the previous spouse as "deceased." White men sometimes supported both their official white families and and their non-official black families. Miscegenation was illegal in most places, but when did that ever stop people from doing what they wanted to do? Having two families wasn't limited to white men, of course. Color is no barrier to nefarious behavior. On top of all that, most people didn't even have birth certificates until the 1940s or later. Home births were the rule rather than the exception, deceased family members were buried in family plots without the coroner ever visiting, and still births were never reported. Record keeping was lots looser back then, and you can explain your story in any number of different ways.
And today, thanks to modern DNA testing, a man can know whether the kids are really his or not. Countless men in times past raised other men's children. Some suspected, some knew, some had no clue. But they had little legal recourse with no proof.
Oh, yeah. Lots of second families around here. I had a Great Gramps with one that nobody knew about for 50 something years. Lived in the same town for generations without knowing they were related, meetin' and skeetin' and wondering where all the hunchbacks, clubbed feet, and weird genetic diseases in their kids were coming from. Had another Great Grams who ran off with somebody she shouldn't have, got a drunk priest to sign the paperwork, but her father found out and bribed a more municipal authority to annul the union under the "failure to consummate" clause. Or so the story goes. I'm fairly sure granny consummated that several times before her pops caught up with her. To the greater point, I'm not sure if any of my ancestors who came off the boat were ever issued American marriage certificates. Not sure if anyone cared. This would have been in the 1900-1910 range. Or if they were, they were probably rubber stamped by the Catholic Church, which was the supreme authority on the subject then. Like @Catriona Grace said, people were born, died, buried, common-lawed, and all that with minimal oversight or regulation. And then one hurricane could easily have wiped the paper off the map. The 1938 and 1954 hurricanes up here took out a few town halls, I think. I might have my grannies crossed, but I think the same one with the suspicious annulment also rode her house across the Misquamicut River in the 1938 hurricane. Like, the house was literally was blown off its stanchions, floated across the pond, and was deposited on the golf course on the opposite bank with her waving her arms ad screaming from the window the whole time. My dad might have embellished that one a bit, but never let facts get in the way of a good story!
My (let me count them up) great-great-great grandfather absconded with a fair skinned enslaved woman, leaving behind a legal wife and half a dozen children in Kentucky. He and his second wife ( my ggggrandmother) ended up in Arkansas Territory and had four children before she died. He married a third time to a woman much younger than he. They had two sons, she divorced his sorry ass in 1852, and headed for Texas with her sons and two of her stepsons. He was never heard of again, though census records for her and the boys exist. I've always admired that third wife. Obtaining a divorce in 1852 was no small feat.
Thanks! People who don't know me well say that a lot. And the people who do say, dear God, not another story, run!
