Is it possible that your person of interest had a short-term marriage, perhaps after a longer one that resulted from the death of a spouse. A relative, shortly after his wife of twenty years died, married a local woman in the 1870s only to divorce her within a year.
His family never mentioned her as if it never happened. The divorce records were quite informative and would not have been located had I not just decided to look “just in case.”
3 Responses
I know that from family experience. I’m working on that idea in my head.
A “short-term spouse” could be a 1st marriage. In going through marriage records, I’ve found marriages for some of my relatives to people I never knew about. The spouse I knew was from a later marriage.
Indexing old news items I find that sometimes a couple may get married, have the wife die in childbirth and the husband get married again all in the 10 year span. Wisconsin had a good idea in 1895 and 1905 with their own census. Except the 1895 one doesn’t show up on Ancestry. That would really have helped since the 1890 was mostly destroyed.