My wife and I both have a set of ancestors who were immigrants and I think the groom wrote back and said “I need a bride.” One might be tempted to think that the bride and groom were born in the same village.
In both cases, that’s not what happened.
In the case of my ancestor, her father was a “windmill mechanic” and moved occasionally for his work. In the other case, the bride was working as a hired girl in the village where the groom was born and raised.
Sometimes romantic visions of our ancestors need to discarded. It makes for good fiction, but not necessarily good genealogy. And oftentimes the real story is more interesting anyway.
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