So how many times did your grandfather attempt to get married?

I am still trying to find my grandmother (my Mom's mom) so I have been trying all sorts of different approaches and a different ancestry search site and have gotten two new bits of info. One is that she had a baby boy named Robert in 1928 (and eerily enough, he was born exactly, to the day, 17 years before I was) I have found no record of his death but I think he might be the baby my Mom told me was stillborn (only a boy not twin girls). She was only two when it happened and they evidently never talked about it again, so her recollection of the event really can't be taken as complete truth.
Second bit of info is the Marriage License Application between my grandfather (my Mom's Dad) and yet another young woman. That makes 3 previous to my grandmother. One appears to have been finalized by the actual marriage ceremony (no evidence of a divorce or death on this one either) but the other two were just applications with no completion that I have found. Then there was my grandmother, she is the only young marriageable woman in his life (so far that I have found) that he didn't apply to marry. And that could very well be why I can find nothing on that issue at all.

Now my imagination is running rampant with all the possible scenarios involved in their life together. Course the most likely one would explain why my Mom described her dad as a very unhappy, hard to get along with....and that they did not have a close relationship at all.

This is really getting exciting.

 

It has been interesting to say the least. I never met him, he died almost two months before I was born.
He was barely 20 when he married the first time, 23 at the time of one of the marriage applications and 25 at the time of the second one. And he was 32 when he and my grandmother got together. Strange also is that I can find no info on how the first marriage ended......or if it did.

My first thought was 'what a rogue' but the marriages could have been canceled by the bride-to-be for whatever reason and that could have been a heart breaker for him. The second application was canceled because he was drafted into the Army during WWI and sent to Europe for a few years....maybe she didn't want to wait for him.

 

I was just doing some searching by family members names on Ancestry the other day and found my Mom on another members tree.....so I wrote them about it. Turns out the guy's wife is my Mom's 2nd cousin 2X removed by way of my Mom's Aunt. My Mom was named after the Aunt so he received a 'Leaf' recently connecting him to my Mom's information. That was very interesting since I was beginning to think that whole part of my family was from another planet and had no family on earth at all.

 

I have contacted two members whose information about my great-granddad was incorrect but haven't heard anything back from them. They both had his name wrong, told them I have a photo of his headstone with the correct name and a couple of other documents if they are interested but evidently they are not. I have a pretty thick skin after years of owning and/or moderating some e-lists where I got a lot of "do you know who I am" responses from members who didn't like me expecting them to keeping the rules.....not sure if an angry distant family member would rattle me, especially if I had proof that they were wrong.

You have a membership on the familysearch.org site don't you? Have you found information there that ancestry doesn't have? That's where I found info on the birth of my Mom's baby brother.....even entering all the pertinent info into the search fields nothing about him comes up in an ancestry. com.

I am thinking I will join family search and make that my main tree location.

 

My paternal grandmother would never answer questions about family history either, she kept saying there were probably horse thieves hanging in our tree (she didn't know what a pun was so she wasn't trying to be funny) but I found out not too long ago that the real reason was that she was a few months older than her parents marriage. She was the first one in our family to have been divorced so I guess she figured another disgrace was more than she could handle and changed her birth year to 1910.

 

We never had any written family history, my great-grandfather has been written about in a locally published book on Ranger, Texas....he was an oil well shooter back in the early 1900s. But Randy's side has had some papers with a lot of info on them that were spirited away by a greedy Aunt of his when his grand-mother passed a few years ago. Thankfully, his Mom was able to make copies of some of them a few years earlier, before they disappeared.

I never could get any information from relatives either so my history remained a mystery.....thanks to the internet, I now know more about my family than I ever thought possible. I have my Glenn line back to before the American Civil War with a hint of an ancestor from The Netherlands and several other lines are leading back to Ireland as where most of my ancestors came to the U.S from.

 

Update on my grandfather. He was married to a young woman named Ruth in Oct, 1912.....no information about a divorce but there is a link to her with another husband about 3 years later.

In Aug 1915 he applied for a Marriage License with Melissa Mae but I have yet to find that the marriage actually occurred other than he stated that he was married when he registered for the draft in 1917.

In 1919 he and Hattie applied to marry but because the Army sent him to Germany that year, the wedding didn't take place until July 1920 when he was home on leave. There was no divorce info to explain what happened to Hattie.

In 1924 (according to info my Mom had) he and my grandmother 'married' but there is absolutely no proof of that, my Mom was born in 1926 and they had a stillborn boy in 1928.

In 1936, Hattie filed for and was granted a divorce from him....the reason was desertion.

This would all be one explanation for my Mom's description of him as being an angry and distant Dad to her....possibly her birth kept him from being able to continue 'moving on' like he had 3 times before.

All this information and it still appears that my grandmother didn't exist before 1924.