Never assume that a widowed relative did not marry again after their spouse died. Always search the records. One reason that female ancestors “disappear” after their husbands die is that they are living with a subsequent husband under a new last name.
Widowers or widows with young children are more likely to marry again, frequently for financially pragmatic reasons. Some may wait until “late in life” to marry again–at a stage in their life when descendants do not think to look for a marriage record.
Records of later marriages may give detail on the ancestor not given in their initial marriage record.
If the subsequent marriage does not go well and results in no children, reference to it may not be made in an obituary, death notice, tombstone, etc.
12 Responses
You make a good point, but that’s a funny headline. How does a person get married after she is dead?
I decided to leave it…just to get people thinking. Sometimes in the online trees one will find marriage entries for a person after they have died 😉
and children born before the parent’s birth or after her death
Sorry that I didn’t notice others’ comments on the headline before I commented just now.
My father told me that his grandmother had moved from Georgia and was living with his family in Florida when she died. I assumed my great grandmother’s last name was her married name and I searched for her death certificate for years without success. Finally I searched the Florida death records on Ancestry.com using just her given name and found her under her second husband’s surname. With the correct name, I was then able to order her death certificate and find other records to add to her timeline.
My 3rd great grandfather married again before his first wife died. You can imagine how shocked I was to find him listed in the 1850 census living in Sing Sing prison for bigamy. I then knew to look further for his first wife and was successful but I don’t know what happened to him after 1850
My g-grandfather, raised a Catholic, married a number of women without ever having divorced anyone. He was all over the western states, 1870-1910 or so, spent lots of time in assorted jails, but usually for larceny or absconding, or not paying for his room and board. Finally in 1901 and again in 1905, police departments in Denver, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, Seattle started coordinating their efforts and discovered he had at least 6 “wives,” including the only legitimate one, I hope – to my g-grandmother ( I have a date but no place for their marriage), with whom he had 7 children. ALthough his primary motive in bigamy was to trick older women, often perceived to be wealthy widows who ran boarding houses, out of their money, it’s possible that he may have had children with some of those illegal wives, in which case I might have a bunch of mystery cousins out there.
That’s a very interesting story, Mary. It sounds like it left a fair amount of records behind as well.
Looking beyond the simple point of widowhood not necessarily being for life… Sometimes deaths of a dominant family member can trigger weddings of their children. The son can finally marry the housekeeper, the daughters can escape a life of drudgery, the granddaughter can finally marry her uncle (yes, unfortunately, that happened). Or the widowed husband can finally get his hands on his stepdaughter. Yes that one too. It’s hard to look at history with modern eyes sometimes.
That’s true. The death of a parent can trigger quite a few responses.
If the first marriage was ‘in the old country’, the application for
a second marriage here may give names of the parents & even occupations.
Well that explains a few interesting facts I didn’t think were really what I thought may have been going on. Now the information makes sense.