Posts in December 17, 2018

Avoid assuming that everything has a “meaning” or a “secret” behind it. For years I tried to figure out “why” my grandparents went to the town they did to elope. When asked decades ago, Grandma just said “your grandpa just got it in his head” to go there. The town was eighty miles from where my grandparents lived and would have been a long trip on Illinois “highways” in December of 1935. There were no family members who lived there (I’ve looked). It likely was someplace they could get married quickly and was far enough away from that the license’s appearance in the local newspapers would not be seen by relatives. Sometimes there’s not a “real secret to be discovered,” just the fact that an ancestor tried to […]