Your relatives may have gotten divorced and listed themselves as widowed on every record after that. Other than the divorce record (if you know where it took place and can find), there may be no mention of how the marriage actually ended.
Census records may give their marital status as widowed, obituaries may mention just the marriage, death certificates may not indicate their marital status as divorced either. Obituaries and death certificates may contain information provided by a relative who did not want others to know of the divorce or may not have actually known about it themselves.
Mention of the court action regarding the divorce in a local newspaper may be one way to potentially find the record.
3 Responses
My divorced grandparents married each other using their middle names instead of their first names and my grandmother used her first married sur name which I didn’t know. It took me many years to find their marriage date.
I wasn’t sure if my grandmother & her 1st husband were ever legally divorced, even though I had found their marriage license. Last year I went to the county court house where they had been married & looked for a divorce around the time that he remarried. Found it! & was able to see all the testimony from the late 1890s. The clerk was very helpful.
Good find! I have an uncle by marriage who divorced his first wife after he married my aunt.