52/52 Week #1: Fresh Start (Lillian Love Hall Searles Rude)

Tags

Adoption, Divorce, Hall, Paternal, Rude, Searles, Separation

The 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge is one of those blogging challenges I have probably started at least a time or two but never stuck with. As much as I like to write, blogging has somehow eluded me, at least in part. But this year’s challenge is themed, which may give me some better directions other than just the “pick 52 ancestors”, and may help me keep on better track.

The theme for week 1, January 1-7, is “Fresh Start”.

I thought about this for a long time before I decided what to write about. Any immigrant ancestor would qualify as a “fresh start”. I did have a few recent lines that were recent immigrants (if you count the 1850s as “recent”), but most of them are from old Colonial lines from before 1650. The most extreme examples of “fresh start” would be my four Mayflower passenger ancestors. Would I want a “fresh start” on researching any particular person? Couldn’t think of anything there, or any research I’d want to erase.

But then it occurred to me which “fresh start” I wanted to address. It’s not necessarily a person, although I have two good examples from within two generations of the same family. Rather, it’s a fairly common practice at the time before there was good identification and solid record keeping: the “fresh start” of the casual illegal divorce.

We think of divorce as a fairly modern concept, but in fact divorce goes back nearly as far as marriage. It’s just that it lacks the stigma today that it used to have. My own parents divorced when I was eleven, and I look back on it as a relatively benign period in my life. On the other hand, my great-grandmother Ruth Adele (Snyder) Curtis (1896-1982) legally divorced my great-grandfather William Marcus Curtis (1876-1950) back in the 1920s, and because she was a schoolteacher, she had to lie about her marital status and tell employers she was a widow.

There was an old saying from the late 1800s/early 1900s, a tactful way of asking a young widow about her true marital status: grass or sod? The expanded version of this was asking if her husband was “over grass or under sod”, meaning “is he alive or dead”? It was so common for women, and sometimes men, to refer to themselves as widows/widowers when they actually meant divorced that I always look at self-proclaimed widows under the age of 70 or so prior to the early 1900s with a jaundiced eye, until I can verify the actual deaths.

The two most vivid examples in my own family tree of the informal? casual? illegal divorce came from two generations on my father’s side of the family. The first case is that of my third-great-grandmother, Fanny (Calkins) Rude Dewell Houghtaling (1832-1899), but I think I will save her for another time.

The second case involves my great-great grandparents on my father’s side: Fanny’s son Norman Hebron Rude (1854-1936) and his wife Lillian Love (Hall) Rude (1853-1932). Lillian was Norman’s first wife, but Lillian had been married before.

Lillian Love Hall Searles Rude, taken about 1880 after her marriage to Norman

Lillian Love Hall was born in 1853 in Toledo, Lucas, Ohio, to Charles Bowen Hall (1826-1880) and Mary Converse or Convis (1831-1871). When she was just sixteen years old, on 15 March 1870,  Lillian married Charles Henry Searles, a widower (yes, a real widower) twenty years her senior, who had three daughters from his brief marriage to Lucy Allen, before her death in 1862. Charles’ oldest daughter, Frances, was only four years younger than Lillian.

Lillian and Charles’ marriage record

On 2 December 1871, in Arbela, Tuscola, Michigan, Lillian gave birth to their son, John Lowell Searles.

There really isn’t a way to know what happened when, or when the marriage between Lillian and Charles started to break down, or why. According to Lillian’s obituary in the 18 February 1932 issue of the Mexico Independent (Mexico, Oswego, New York), Lillian and Norman married on 26 October 1876. By the 1880 census, Lillian, Norman, and John Searles (listed as Norman’s stepson) were living together in Bay City, Bay, Michigan. Many people here would assume that her first husband Charles had died prior to her marriage to Norman.

They would be wrong.

Charles Searles is also enumerated in the 1880 census, in Arbela, Tuscola, Michigan, where his son John had been born. Everything about him appears consistent with previous information; he was 47 years old in 1880, a farmer, born in Massachusetts and parents born in Massachusetts. Under the checkboxes for single, married, or widowed, the last box, widowed, is marked.

I continued following this Charles Searles until his death in 7 June 1913 in Arbela. He is buried in Pine Grove Cemetery in nearby Millington, in the same cemetery with daughters Frances and Annette, and the same town as his daughter Emma (Imogene). His daughter Frances was the reporter on his death certificate. So he was quite definitely alive through 37 years of Lillian’s marriage to Norman Rude.

Charles also remarried a third time, to a woman named Elizabeth Ash, the widow (real) of Roswell Brooks. Charles and Elizabeth married on 19 November 1892 in Tuscola.

However, there is absolutely no evidence I have found to date that Charles and Lillian legally ended their marriage. I traded research services with a good researcher in Michigan, who searched the divorce records in the supreme courts filed not only in Tuscola County, but also in the neighboring counties, and found nothing under their names. It’s further complicated by the fact that Michigan did not require recording divorces on the county level until 1897, so it was necessary to search on the court level. The researcher knew which supreme court had covered Tuscola County and had checked that one first with no results.

In short, it appears both Lillian and Charles may have been legally bigamists.

This situation was not that uncommon. Divorce was no more free then than it is now, and quite a bit harder to get. Usually there had to be significant grounds even to obtain a divorce, and the process was very costly by the average income standards at the time. Divorce was disproportionately practiced among the wealthy; poor people simply stopped being married in their own eyes, if not in the eyes of the law. Without records, it was simply a matter of moving on and hoping you didn’t get caught.

However, the other reason I strongly believe this was a “poor man’s divorce” was the fact that there was a rumor among my relatives on that side of the family that there was a big, dark secret hanging over that family that Nobody Talked About.

At some point in his life, John Searles, son of Lillian and Charles Searles, became John Rude and dropped the name Searles altogether. He married twice, a tragically short marriage to Louisa Ludrick in 1899 (they married 13 December 1899; she died eight months later), followed by a long and fruitful 53-year marriage to Mertie Weaver in 13 March 1901, which produced twelve children. Both his marriage certificates, as well as his death certificate on 14 October 1935, as well as the corresponding newspaper announcements, listed his parents as Norman Rude and Lillian Hall. He became a Rude by tradition, though not by birth.

Ironically, John Searles is likely the only “legitimate” child of Lillian Love Hall. She went on to have five more children with Norman Rude, including her youngest, my own great-grandmother Bessie Hope (Rude) Austin, but due to the fact she was probably never legally married to Norman, those five are technically illegitimate. In fact, depending on the laws in some states, they would legally be Charles Searles’ children, if she was in fact still married to him!

Lillian Love Hall Searles Rude, taken about 1920

I can see why this would be seen as a Big Terrible Horrible Secret back in the day, but in our more relaxed mores of today, this can be seen in its proper light. Two people married at very different points in their lives, a sixteen year old girl and a thirty-six year old widower with three children. The marriage, for whatever reason, did not work. They went their separate ways, perhaps amicably, perhaps not. My opinion is it was possibly amicable because Lillian got to keep their son (given laws regarding custody at the time, Charles was legally entitled to keep his child and she was not). She married and moved away, and he stayed behind. Eventually, he found a third wife, and perhaps love and companionship. Norman and Lillian moved back to New York State sometime in the 1890s and, by all accounts, had something of a hardscrabble existence as farmers, but extensive family pictures show a large and companionable family. It seems it all worked out well in the end, so who really cares about the whole issue of “legitimacy”? The many descendents of John Searles Rude’s large family are still blood cousins through Lillian, and heart cousins through Norman. What matters is that it seemed to result in, if not a fairytale happy ending, at least contentment.