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I'm really surprised at the number of divorces I've found in the family history. I don't mean abandonment, just leaving. I mean go to court and put asunder the "till death do us part"s. These are way before divorce started becoming more common in the 60s and 70s, and onward. The oldest are going back to the late 1800s on both sides. There are a few in the early and mid 1900s, too, among cousins, aunts and uncles, so not all direct line ancestors. I'm thinking maybe when the first marriage didn't work out, divorce was something done quietly and not much talked about afterwards.
Do you have many/any divorces in your family tree? Or were my family just trendsetters?
None in my direct line as far back as I can go but my wife was divorced previously and there was at least one in her line back three generations. Mostly people died young.
The earliest formal family divorce I've found is the mid 1940's. The fact the husband was almost 40 years older than his wife seems to have played a significant factor. As you said, abandonment seems to have been much more common. One of my pre-Civil War abandonments include a young hometown couple who were married and moved to a different state. After a couple years, he returned home to his parents, while she lived out her life in the distant state as head of household. She never remarried. Would luv to know the rest of that story...
Have you looked into divorce laws where your family lived at the time? I've found just one in my direct family, and it is four generations back in Europe. In that case, the couple did not actually divorce, but the husband moved on and the wife eventually settled down with another man.
The really fascinating part was the divorce laws where they lived, though. Catholics could not divorce. Protestants and Jews could (Protestants as of the mid-1700's, Jews as of the mid-1800's). Catholics in their country were finally granted the right to divorce shortly before 1900. In my family's case, it was a religiously mixed marriage, so divorce would have been permitted but for some reason wasn't pursued. Very interesting!
None in my direct line as far back as I can go but my wife was divorced previously and there was at least one in her line back three generations. Mostly people died young.
I don't find this to be true, but it's a common myth. Probably the myth continues because the proportion of people dying young was much higher in the past. Yes, there was much higher infant and child mortality than today because of inadequate medical knowledge and treatment. But if a person made it through childhood, and most did, he or she had a decent chance of living to their 60s, 70s, or beyond.
If they did die in their 20s or 30s it was most often do to accidents, infectious disease or war. A few died in their 40s or 50s of cancers or infectious disease. Many made it to their 60s or 70s than mostly had heart disease or other common age related deaths. A surprising number lived into their 80s or 90s. A few even made it to 100 and a few years beyond. Most cause of deaths for 80+ read like their body just wore out, which is pretty much what happens.
If a fair percentage of people didn't have a full life span society would not maintain, never mind make progress technologically. And there's been a tremendous amount of progress in the past few hundred years.
Have you looked into divorce laws where your family lived at the time? I've found just one in my direct family, and it is four generations back in Europe. In that case, the couple did not actually divorce, but the husband moved on and the wife eventually settled down with another man.
The really fascinating part was the divorce laws where they lived, though. Catholics could not divorce. Protestants and Jews could (Protestants as of the mid-1700's, Jews as of the mid-1800's). Catholics in their country were finally granted the right to divorce shortly before 1900. In my family's case, it was a religiously mixed marriage, so divorce would have been permitted but for some reason wasn't pursued. Very interesting!
Catholics did divorce, at least in the US where the court would not ask and did not care about the religious background of divorce petitioners. Btw the ancestors of Protestants were Catholic before the reformation began in the 1500s.
Both of my parents came from a second marriage. My father's mother was married, had a son, divorced and remarried, then had my father (in 1924) and his brother.
My mother's father had two sons from his first marriage, divorced and remarried, and had my mother (1926) and her sister.
Those divorces would have been in the early 1920s, though I don't know the exact dates or any details. Neither my parents nor grandparents talked much about their early lives. My parents themselves were married for 54 years until my mother died.
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