Scrutinizing Broken Limbs on Family Trees
By Myra Vanderpool Gormley, CG

While most of us think of divorces as modern-day inventions, actually they have been around a long time in America.

As early as 1639 in Massachusetts Bay Colony, James Luxford’s wife asked for a divorce because James already had another wife. A magistrate granted the divorce, took the now-former Mrs. Luxford and their children under the court’s protection, and seized James’s property and transferred it all to her. Then the court fined James one-hundred pounds and sentenced him to “be set in the stocks an hour upon the market day after the lecture and to be banished to England by the first opportunity.”

Breaking Up Was Hard to Do
Despite their belief that the family was the basis of political and ecclesiastical authority, seventeenth-century Puri-tans held that marriage was a civil contract that could, under certain circumstances, be broken. Divorce was permissible on several grounds including adultery, long absence, and cruelty.

Under Dutch rule of New Nether-land, an occasional divorce was granted, as was the case in 1655 when John Hickes presented a petition for divorce to the colonial council alleging that his wife had deserted him for nine years and had procreated five or six children by another man. The council granted him “letters of divorce” and authorized him to marry “some honest maid or widow.”

In 1788, Congregational minister Benjamin Trumbull expressed outrage that 390 couples had received divorces in Connecticut during the preceding fifty years. However, numerous other couples ended their marriages in ways other than divorce. In South Carolina, for example, where divorce was prohibited until the middle of the twentieth century, and in North Carolina, where divorces before 1827 could be obtained only for impotency or adultery, numerous wives sought divorces of bed and board (a mensa et thoro), a legal separation that did not permit the spouses to remarry. Other marriages ended in desertions—notices in old newspapers frequently tell stories of abandonment and “runaway” spouses.

Divorce laws varied in the colonies and states and changed through the years. In early Kentucky the only way to obtain a divorce was by an Act of the General Assembly. In 1809, a law was passed in the state that authorized the circuit courts to grant divorces. Still, divorces continued to be granted by legislative acts until 1849.

By 1850, there was conflict between the pro-divorce and the anti-divorce factions in the United States, and between 1850 and the beginning of a divorce reform movement in about 1880, divorce was frequently in the media spotlight. Under early statutes, the offending party could not remarry as long as his or her former spouse lived. By 1873, this had changed and divorced parties could remarry, but only one divorce was permitted to any person, except in those cases where a person was found not at fault for the divorce.

Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places?
Divorce records are found in diverse repositories, but nineteenth-century and earlier divorces are often found in county or circuit courts or their counterparts. Divorces filed soon after statehood may be in the proceedings of a state’s legislative body, while those filed before statehood may be in territorial or colonial legislative records.

Discovering a divorce in the family sometimes occurs while researching other aspects of a genealogy. Old news-paper articles can throw the spotlight on previously unknown events along with some quaint terminology as shown in this example:

Cale Shoemake, who terrorized eastern Oklahoma as a bandit, was made a widower when his wife received a divorce. Shoemake is now serving time in McAlester prison. (Muskogee Daily Phoenix, 8 July 1919.)

Dual-Purpose Divorce
Sometimes trying to untangle indi-viduals of the same name or sort out family units necessitates looking at any and every record you can find in a particular locality. Evidently our ancestors were totally oblivious to the genealogical messes they were creating when cousins removed to the same localities, even at different times, and proceeded to name their children for their grandparents, aunts, and uncles, thus creating chaos for us when we attempt to sort out the numerous Sarahs, Marys, Elizabeths, Johns, Williams, and Josephs.

Even when dealing with an un--com-mon surname, this plethora of common given names, especially of those who came of age in the 1880s and through the early 1900s, presents a challenge to untangle. The loss of the 1890 U.S. census, which creates a twenty-year gap between 1880 and 1900, can be a formidable obstacle—especially in tracing daughters, who could be born and married in that time frame, leaving few ways to identify them or make their links to a particular family line.

For example, when sorting out Kimbro families living in Erath County, Texas, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, I was presented with such a problem until, in des-peration, I searched divorce records there in order to learn more about the N. C. McAlister in Thomas Kimbro’s 1880 household. N. C. was listed as Thomas’s daughter in that enumeration, and in the 1870 census Thomas had a daughter, Nancy J., whose age fit. I found a marriage record for a Nancy J. Kimbro and John R. McAlister in that locality in 1877. But where was that husband in 1880, and why is Nancy in her father’s household? Where had she disappeared to by 1900? A petition for divorce filed in 1879 exposed a less-than-happy couple and provided the following answers:

The husband [John R. McAlister] said that on the 14th day of December AD 1877 he was legally united with the defendant in marriage in the County of Erath and further avers that on the 30th day of May AD 1878 the defendant in the County of Erath committed adultery with one David Bowden.

Nancy Jane’s story, however, differed considerably from her husband’s. She denied each and every allegation and said that at all times since said marriage she has been a good and true wife to the plaintiff. She also noted that while she lived with the plaintiff, he frequently refused to allow her to visit her immediate relatives and friends and forbade her to have any association with them, holding himself and his family superior to Nancy Jane and her family. Nancy Jane also said that, although her husband was usually of a kind and considerate deportment toward her, he compelled her to reside in the house with his mother (the old story of a mother-in-law) who, without cause or provocation, entertained a violent prejudice to Nancy Jane and frequently alluded to Nancy Jane’s marriage with her son as a disgrace to the McAlister family and had so stated to persons other than Nancy Jane. Nancy Jane claimed she was ruined and disgraced in the eyes of the community by her husband’s actions and allegations and asked for alimony and lawyers’ fees and to have her name changed from Nancy Jane McAlister to Nancy Jane Kimbro which was her name before her marriage.

Knowing that Nancy had been divorced, I went back to the marriage records and found her second marriage, which took place in the same county in 1880. Even though she had requested her name be changed back to her maiden name, her second marriage was indexed under McAlister, not Kimbro. With the name of her second husband, I was able to find her and her family in the 1900 census—in the Oklahoma Territory.

Warts and All
Our ancestors were not perfect, but, warts and all, they are ours. Sometimes it comes as a shock to discover that not every love story on the family tree had a happily-ever-after ending. And a lot of times, divorce records make us want to know the rest of the story.

John Baker and Francis Coil were married in Coryell County, Texas, in 1869. In his petition for divorce, filed 23 September 1873, John stated that he lived with the defendant in the counties of Coryell, Hamilton, and Brazos for about two years. He charged that his wife became “unmindful of the vows that She had made to plaintiff & Heaven, Sacrificed her Womanhood upon the altar of Lust, and did then and there & on divers other times commit the unhallowed crime of adultery with one T. J. Crawson.” We also learn their current residences—Baker filed his suit in Erath County; wife Francis was then living in McLennan County.

A May 1873 divorce filed in the Polk County, Oregon, Circuit Court provides a March 1853 date for the marriage of Julia Ann (Cooper) Matney and W. J. Matney, with Julie Ann’s complaint about W. J.’s “violent and cruel treatment of her” that compelled her at one o’clock in the morning to go to her brother’s house, which was two miles distant, for the protection of her life. She also claimed that W. J. was guilty of habitual gross drunkenness for more than five years. Genealogical data gleaned from these divorce papers include the names and ages of their six children.

Divorce records usually contain a couple’s marital history (including marriage date and place), information about their property, current and former residences, and dates of other important events such as the children’s births and the date of the divorce. Some include the wife’s maiden (or former) surname, and ages and/or birth dates of the husband and wife. Divorces are administered in the court systems, so the process of obtaining divorce records varies greatly. Divorce records may not be indexed and may require some real digging.

However, divorce records can be invaluable to your family history, and they’re worth looking into. So while searching for information about your ancestors, don’t neglect divorce records. While they often reveal a darker side of the family’s history, they can also solve genealogical mysteries.

Myra Vanderpool Gormley is a certified genealogist and the editor of RootsWeb Review. She is a retired syndicated columnist and feature writer for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate. In her spare time, she traces her illustrious ancestors and prunes the others.

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