One interesting genealogical activity is to try and determine how your relatives met their spouses.
Marriage requires a geographical proximity and, with the exception of online dating and personals ads, the initial connection does as well. My parents and grandparents met through geographic proximity based upon where they grew up. For their siblings that was true as well with the addition of moves for higher education and military service being added to the mix.
I had one great-aunt whose initial connection to her husband had always puzzled me. A re-reading of her obituary suggested the likely connection. The great-aunt had finished out her high school career while living with her grandmother some thirty miles from where she grew up and where she had attended her first three years of high school. She later attended nursing training in the town that was the county seat in the county in which the grandmother lived. The husband was from in between those two towns.
My statement would be that while I don’t know exactly how they met it seems probable that their initial meeting was when she was living with her grandmother or attending nurse’s training.
When drawing inferences one needs to be careful and indicate that inferences have been made.
One response
I was curious to know how my maternal grandmother, born in Nova Scotia, and my farmer grandfather, born in Massachusetts met. When I asked my mother’s youngest sister if she knew the answer, I was skeptical. This woman, the last surviving child of her parents, was elderly at the time and intellectually challenged all her life, if that is the correct term today. Her memory was good, however.
According to her, they met while they were working as nurses at a state hospital not far from where my grandfather grew up. He was listed as a farmer on all census records that he appeared in and her common name did not lead me to a passenger list, naturalization record or any other helpful information.
I learned that my aunt was right by doing a google search of their names. Sure enough, they both appeared in several yearly reports for that hospital, listed as nurses! Not only that, my grandmother’s sister also appeared on one of those lists, as well as her first husband.