No Love Lost
Through interlibrary loan, I ordered a roll of microfilm from Clark County, Indiana, hoping to find a “local” record of Anne Pamela Green Ball’s death that I’d found in the New York City newspaper.
I haven’t found one yet, but I did find some other information on the family I’ll post in another entry.
Much of the business of the day was printed in those early newspapers. I found lots of advertisements for merchants, minutes of the local medical society, ads for sheriff’s sales for back taxes, a few notices of runaway slaves, and then notices of spousal abandonment– usually the husband writing about the wife. As a child in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I remember seeing notices like “I will be responsible for no debts other than my own” in our small town local newspaper and asking my mom what they were for. She told me it usually meant the people were getting a divorce and this was part of the process.
The earlier matrimonial-distress notices I saw in the Indiana Intelligencer and Farmer’s Friend were much more descriptive. Here’s on from William W. Love, posted 1 January 1822.
Doesn’t he sound pained? I thought this was was a little more dramatic than the others I’d read, but what made it really different was what immediately followed:
I looked up “Replication” at Online Etymology Dictionary, and sure enough, it’s meaning has changed from how we use it most often today. It was formerly a legal term for a reply, “to answer to a legal charge.”
Mary is the only wife I’ve found who published a response. And she’s obviously not shy about answering each of William’s points. Now I’m curious about Mary. As far as I know, she wasn’t one of my relatives, but I’d be proud to be her descendant.
There is, by the way, in the paper about a month later, a statement that Mary has filed for divorce from William. Looks like Mary was indeed free to express her own opinion, despite William’s notice to the contrary.
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