Ever been totally surprised?

[nightbird47]

Originally Posted by OpenD

Not only that, but marriage of first cousins was actually encouraged in certain situations. For one thing, it tended to keep property in the extended family, or even consolidate it. And for another thing, it was believed to enhance certain family characteristics. Remember, many of our ancestors were farmers and bred animals, so they were well acquainted with the concepts bringing certain characteristics forward by the way the mating was matched up. It sounds funny today, but 200 years ago it was a common practice.

And that was my biggest surprise, to discover two marriages in my patrilineal line between first cousins. Before that I had no idea such things were once approved of, and sometimes even arranged.

Part was that populations were scattered, and often there wasn't a lot of choice. The cousin you knew and trusted was better than someone you only knew from the outside. Married children often lived with parents as well, so it simplified matters.

It was also very common for men to marry sisters, either two brothers marrying two sisters, or men marrying the sister of a deseased wife. It kept all the children in the family that way. My great grandfather actually married the grand neice of his first wife. She was the daughter of the first wife's youngest sisters's grand daughter. But they all lived in the same extended home with the double sets of parents so when he moved in with his young children after Agness died, it must have seemed quite reasonable to marry Euphemia who was only a few years younger.

[OpenD]

Here's another few surprises for me... all from combing Census records:

As far as I knew until I started my family search this year, my maternal grandmother was born and raised in Virginia. As a child my family used to take regular trips to visit her mother, my great grandmother, in Virginia, in the same little town where she had always lived, and where my mother and her siblings were all born. But when I pulled up the 1940 Census (my hometown Historical Society had done a brilliant job of getting the indexing done early), I noticed that my grandfather listed his birthplace as Virginia, while my grandmother listed her birthplace as Kentucky. I was intrigued.

My curiosity piqued, I looked back at the 1930 Census, and found the same... everyone in the household born in Virginia, except my grandmother. Then I dug up my mother's marriage license, which listed her mother as being born in Kentucky. A few years later her younger sister married, and her license said the same. Then a few more years later the youngest sister married, and for her mother's birthplace she wrote Virginia. Then in another hand, someone crossed that out and wrote in Kentucky. Puzzling!

Going back to earlier Censuses, aided by her unusual last name, I found a listing for her at age 10 in Kentucky, in the small town listed on my aunt's marriage license, just as I expected. But due to the power of digital indexes, I ALSO found something unexpected... a listing for a girl of exactly the same name and age in Virginia, in the same small town my mother was born in, living with the people I knew as my great grand-parents, and listed as being born in Kentucky!

Going back another 10 years, to the 1900 Census, I found her listed in Kentucky, age 10 months, right where I would have expected to find her... and ALSO found her listed in Virginia, in my great grandfather's household. And again, she was listed as being born in Kentucky. What a puzzle!

There's nobody living who seems to know the story today, but from talking to historians about the era I got an impression of something that might have happened... I can't prove this, but it seems like the most likely explanation...

I believe the two households with the same unusual last name, one in Virginia and one in Kentucky, belonged to brothers. The one in Kentucky had a large family, about 10 children, while the one in Virginia, who was successful and had a large house, had only 1, which was a bit strange for that era. My great grandfather's family had been in that immediate area in Virginia for three generations previous. My great grandmother, was a tiny little thing, about 4' 10" tall (she was still living when I was a child). And my grandmother was their only child.

So my best guess is that my great grandmother in Virginia was unable to have a child, or lost a child, and an infant from her brother-in-law's family was sent to live with her as a surrogate. And whether or not the arrangement was initially intended to be permanent, it became so, and she lived in Virginia until after she married my grandfather and moved away. I'm told that "within the family" adoptions were once common, so as peculiar as the idea of picking out a child to send to your brother's house to be his child might seem to us, I believe this is what happened.

I sure wish there was someone I could ask about it!

On a separate note, I found my late father on the 1940 Census, living right where I expected him to be. Then, again, checking out a multiple hit on an online archive search, I found him a second time on the 1940 census, living a couple of hundred miles away with his older brother in the town where he went to college. Only then did I notice, when I went back to the original listing, the tiny notation "Abt" on his line, which I found out means "Absent." So he was counted once at his parent's house, and again at college.

One last surprise... digging into his records a little deeper, I found his enlistment record a year later, in 1941, only 5 days after Pearl Harbor. I had no idea he was a hero like that, stepping up so quickly. But my dad, always full of surprises, had one more for me... he had been very involved with high school journalism, and he became a professional writer after the war, but when he enlisted his civilian occupation was listed as "Architect." Knowing my father, that could have been a joke. But he wound up a pilot.

[CAVA1990]

About five minutes ago I discovered I'm directly descended from one of the 38 celebrants of the first Thanksgiving in the New World at Berkeley Plantation in 1619.