Monday, March 11, 2013
Yep, EA was divorced from his first wife before marrying Della
According to the marriage certificate that Don and Tamera found a while back, Della and EA were married in Cochise County on December 26, 1908 (not 1906, as we formerly thought). According to what I found at the State Archives last week, the papers from EA's divorce from his first wife were filed in Cochise County on the same date. Della and EA's marriage certificate wasn't actually filed until two days later--to make sure there was no chance the marriage could have been "official" before the divorce?
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It make me wonder if the first wife even knew about the divorce and marriage, did she sign the papers?
ReplyDeleteOh, yeah, she knew. She was there and had some witnesses and agreed to some sort of financial agreement before the divorce itself, etc. All on the up and up. The folks at the Archives told me that it wasn't that uncommon for a divorced woman to say she was a widow, just because divorce still wasn't all that common, even though we have plenty of them in the story of the Castle.
DeleteLillian Tovrea thought she was a "grass widow" anyway, as Lu puts it!!
ReplyDeleteThe term Grass Widow, per the World Wide Words, "The usual meaning given in British dictionaries is of a woman whose husband is temporarily away, say on business. This sense is known in other English-speaking communities such as Australia. It has long been used in the USA in the rather different sense of “a woman who is separated, divorced, or lives apart from her husband”, as the Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary has it."
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