It's been a weird couple of days for me. I looked for my mother's name online and found that she existed only as appended to my father. That was rather startling. More startling was the fact that she was not listed as his spouse at all on some sites. Rather, another woman's name appeared.
Finding my father's marriage to my mother erased threw me. They had six children. That's quite a lot of people to erase. So I asked myself, What's going on? Did my parents get divorced and my mother didn't know about it? I tried checking up on the issue and discovered that in New York, where I live, divorce records are sealed for 100 years. Well, I certainly wasn't going to find any answers there, was I?
I'd known about the new wife, that my father had supposedly remarried. But there was no divorce on this end, so I figured it was a sham marriage, for show only. The presence of this second wife, though, seemed to be erasing my mother. Not only that, on heritage sites, where people trace their ancestry, we, his children, were also erased.
What?
I tried looking in data bases. I tried looking at marriage records, but the marriage and putative divorce could have taken place anywhere, even outside the country. How could I possibly track either one down?
Ah! Finally I found a great use for AI. I Googled the question and let its AI bot go to work for me. The bot asked if I knew the names of the two people involved in the second marriage. Yes, I did. I provided those names and, miracle of miracles, received in response the exact place and date of this second marriage.
Indeed, there was a marriage, in 1968. But how, without a divorce? I asked the bot.
This very helpful AI assistant suggested I contact the country clerk where the marriage took place.
"Ask for the marriage application, not the marriage certificate," the bot directed. On the application people applying for a license have to provide details about the dissolution of a previous marriage. In this way I would find out exactly how, why and when my father divorced my mother--if he did.
This past Thursday I sent an email to the county clerk. The very next morning, on Friday, there was a response. A copy of the application, as executed by my father and his second 'wife' was staring straight at me.
Oh my oh my. Both applicants had checked the box that said, "No previous marriage." There it was. He lied. As a matter of fact, so did she, because I'd seen her husband's gravestone.
In order to get a license my father lied about having a family. It would be hard to describe how stunned, and pleased, I was.
It seemed likely that my father was a bigamist. Not only that--he had perjured himself. He and his intended bride traveled all the way from New York to Elkton, MD in order to commit this perjury. There still remained the remote possibility that there was a secret divorce. But then, why lie? Why the perjury? Why the secrecy?
Could it be that there was a divorce decree and my mother wasn't notified? But that's not possible, because New York law dictates that in a divorce proceeding, notice must be given.
There is one exception to this rule. If the party seeking divorce makes an exhaustive effort to find his spouse but is unsuccessful, then he can publish notice in a newspaper for three consecutive weeks. After that, the divorce is granted. This scenario wouldn't work for my father, though.
My mother had lived in the same place for the ten years before the second 'marriage. My brothers had visited my father during that time, so he could easily have had my mother subpoenaed. Plus, he had been sending child support payments through the courts for years, so he could have subpoenaed her through that channel.
So, why did this couple go to Elkton, specifically, for their license and wedding? Easy answer.
Delmar News Agency. Public domain
Elkton was known as the Marriage Capital of the East Coast. So-called 'quicky' marriages were an industry in Elkton. The process was streamlined. Cab drivers would wait for people at the train station, and guide them through the steps to getting the ceremony accomplished. Fill out the form, wait two days. No blood test. No witnesses. There was a time when marriage in Elkton could be done on the same day, almost instantly, without any waiting period.
I have to pause right now and let my readers know that my father was a lawyer. He knew the requirements of the law and he knew how to get around them. If he signed a form affirming that he had never been married, he knew exactly what he was doing. He just thought nobody else would ever figure it out.
My father had a way of getting around things, of bending rules and slipping right past technicalities. Here's an example of how 'clever' he was:
On his gravestone it states that he was a veteran of WWII. That sounds brave, honorable, doesn't it? But wait...there's a story, a catch. My father signed up in 1941, as the war was beginning. My oldest brother was born in 1942. The next two children (twins) were born in 1944. My older sister was born in 1945. All born during the war years. Wow, how did my father manage to sire so many children while he was away, at war?
Simple answer: he never went to war. Certainly never saw a battlefield. His brothers served. My uncles served, but my father found a way to slip around that. He told my mother to sign a long letter that explained how sick she was and how she couldn't survive on her own. That did it. He was stationed nearby, at a war factory.
This is the kind of quick fix my father managed all his life. Nothing was ever what it seemed with him. And that, apparently, is exactly what went down in Elkton, Md.
With all the secrecy surrounding my father's second 'marriage', one has to guess that he was hiding something. There was no Internet back then. He couldn't imagine the resources that would be at the disposal of ordinary people. He couldn't know that his daughter, with the help of an AI bot, would research marriage records and find his false affidavit at the Elkton County Clerk's office.
So what do I plan do with this information? For one thing, call my sister. I only have two surviving siblings so it's rather disappointing I can't share this with all of them. But my sister was jubilant. She had the same reaction I'd had. We caught him!!
He got away with so much, all his life. I can't count the number of times I've met someone who told me what a fine fella he was. So clever. So eloquent. When actually, the man was horrible. Cruel, violent, selfish. So finally, We had a bit of evidence to prove that he was actually a scheming cad.
But my father is deceased and just about everyone who knew him is gone also. However, there are practical measures I can take.
For one thing, I have to set the record straight at all those online sites. I've been combing through them and correcting the information. I feel a little bad for the woman's children. How much did they know? Did they know he had a family? I don't want to cause her children pain, but the truth matters.
Why does it matter, you may ask.
Fifty years, or a hundreds years from now (if humans still exist then) someone looking up a record will see what is written online, and that entry will become the truth. It will become my mother's history and my father's history, recorded for all time.
My father's false truth will become reality, if I don't correct it. My descendants deserve more. Future historians deserve more. Certainly, my mother-- my honest, loyal, kind mother--deserves that the truth of her life be known.
So, wish me luck. I have a lot of work to do.
Thank you for reading my blog. Hive on!