Untruthful Grandparents
Here’s the Weekly Genealogy Blogging Prompt for Week #15: List some vital signs. Talk about specific birth, marriage and death certificates. Topics may include misspelled names, fudged dates, other anomalies that stand out in your records.
My grandparents both fibbed on their marriage certificate.
My grandmother was born in what is now Beckham County, Oklahoma Territory, 19 January 1906.
My granddad was born in Dewey County, Oklahoma, just after statehood, on 2 November 1908.
In 1929, they were both living with their families in the Oklahoma panhandle in Beaver County.
Lida Lee Anderton and Elmer Dewey Unruh drove two counties away to marry in Woodward, Woodward County, Oklahoma 25 March 1929. Google Maps calculates this trip as an hour and a half today. I don’t know how long the trip was at that time, over mostly dirt roads, but it can’t have been quick.
Lida’s age on 25 March 1929 was 23 years and 3 months or so.
Elmer’s age on 25 March 1929 was 20 years and 5 months or so.
Here’s what they wrote on their license and certificate:
According to this document, Elmer was 21 and Lida was 22! Not a big lie, but not the truth, nonetheless. Lida ignored her last birthday and Elmer assumed his next. I’ve often wondered if Elmer had been the oldest by almost 3 years, would they have felt the need to misrepresent their ages? Probably not, which is part of what makes this act so interesting. Even today we assume that grooms are older than their brides, though we have become somewhat more tolerant, I think.
My grandmother always told me that her marriage license had burned up in a house fire. I accepted this story because I did know that her family had at least 2 house fires. However, when examined more closely, those fires were in the homes of her parents and really should have had nothing to do with their married daughter’s marriage record. I don’t think either one of us thought about this aspect of the story at the time.
As a beginning genealogist I wrote the Woodward County Clerk for a copy of my grandparents’ marriage record. They wrote back telling me that they had no record of such a marriage. Of course I knew they were married but how was I going to document this marriage? If I was going to have trouble with collecting documents for my grandparents, how would I manage the generations further back?
In current Texas panhandle terms, Woodward, Oklahoma, is not very far from my hometown of Perryton, Texas–a short 2 hours. Years after my failed request for this marriage record, my mom was going to Woodward for some reason I now forget. I asked her if she would be willing to go by the Woodward courthouse, “just in case.” She was a good sport about running these sorts of local errands, so when she called to tell me the results, I could hardly believe what I was hearing.
Not only was their marriage record on file, the County Clerk still had the original marriage license application and certificate of marriage. Did she want them? Did she want them!! So I am now in possession of the original marriage certificate of my maternal grandparents. My grandparents never returned for the record and it evidently was not mailed to them. My grandparents didn’t go to Woodward often–if they went to a “big town,” they went to Perryton, Texas, which was less than one-half the distance. So going to Woodward to marry adds another layer of mystery to this deception. They went because no one knew them there and they had a better chance of getting by with their “new” ages.
This exercise taught me several lessons–many of which come as second nature now. One is to be skeptical of what you read, even in official records. Those records are generated by human beings, and human beings are not perfect. Another is to not take “no” for an answer, and that there is no substitute for being on the scene yourself (or, in this case, sending one’s mom). I prize this document for the picture it provides of my grandparents as young people–traveling to the neighboring county to marry, away from persons who would have known them, except with the couple who accompanied them as witnesses, and who were also married that day. They always celebrated their “correct” birthdays–they included them on the Delayed Birth Certificates they filed in 1971.
So a final lesson is to be sure to collect all the documents and compare the information they include. And sometimes they tell a story beyond “just the facts”–a little insight into personalities behind those dry documents.
Elmer and Lida Anderton Unruh
near Sedan, New Mexico
est. 1945
I think I have a similar story, but I still haven’t found where they were married. In my case, my grandfather was allegedly 8 years younger than my grandma. Because of one census and the closeness of births of two of the children, I had suspected that my grandfather might have been born a year after he always said making him almost nine years older than Grandma. This was before I ever got his birth certificate. Giving the earlier date made him 21 when he got married. When I got his birth certificate, the original date given was the later year! However, he had it changed in the 1970s to show the earlier year (he needed it to prove age to get ss benefits). And the evidence offered for the proof of his age? The testimony of his two brothers, one of whom was 8 years older than he and the other 5.
Finding this type of information lends an interesting story to ones ancestry. WHY… did they go so far to marry? My parents went from Michigan to Duluth, MN to marry. My husbands parents went to Indiana from Michigan. I can understand partially the why of it….but there are going to be stories there…..coming out of divorces and working with Coast Guard traveling..a Catholic marrying a Protestant….hmmmm sometimes the documents will raise alot of questions, the answers enrich the stories. [like why did my grandmother fib about where her father was born right down to his obit...I am left to guess]
According to my great-uncle, my great-grandmother, when she remarried as an older woman, lied about her age, not only to the official conducting the marriage but also to her husband! My uncle tells of having been forced to bleach the dates off of her baptismal certificate so she could keep up the charade that she was 10 years younger than she really was. (If I know anything about Nana, it’s that she was EXTREMELY sensitive about her age – and that of her children, too!) Who knows whether her first husband, my great-grandfather, ever knew how old she really was!
I’ve found after doing genealogy for others for over thirty years, that most families have those that told white lies–to make themselves older or younger (or other little fibs). As you probably know, ages on census records are seldom accurate, because one person generally provided the information and sometimes they just guessed or estimated ages for the other members of the household, because they couldn’t think of the birthdays right off hand. You are probably right about your grandfather wanting to be older. In some states it was still a law that the male must be 21 or have his parent’s consent.