Family History: A 70-day Marriage in The Great War

There’s such a contrast in the handwriting on historical documents. I found the marriage license for one of my cousins, a cousin twice removed, or 1C2R. Clara Reynolds McKee, born in 1876 in Galveston, married George Edward Fay in 1894. The names on their marriage license are very elegant, as if the clerk knew to make sure that part was legible. The minister’s handwriting, one J. P. Carter of Grace Church, was slightly less elegant, but it’s still pretty easily read.

Clara’s 1922 death certificate is decidedly less easy to read. I can’t make out her mother’s place of birth (which I don’t have anywhere else that I know of) or the name of the informant, which could be interesting. Judging from the consistency of the handwriting on the form, I’d guess this was all done by the attending doctor, so cue up your jokes about doctors’ handwriting. I really wish he’d had his nurse type it up. Ah, well.

Tangents

As I do, once I get parents in place, I go to work on their kids. Clara and George had four children. Alma was the oldest. Born the day after Christmas 1896, Alma died the day before Christmas 1979. My dad’s records show her as “divorced, no descent,” which struck me as a little sad. But I went to work to see what I could find.

I think I found her death certificate first. It records the disposition of her remains: “Donation to University of Texas Board of Anatomy in Galveston.”

When I eventually found her obituary, her survivors list was disturbingly short. A nephew, a niece, a sister-in-law, and “a dear friend.” Her obituary was under the last name of Hock, which is the name in Dad’s records.

I located her in the 1920 Census, living in Galveston’s Ward 6 with her parents and her brother William. But her last name here was Davis, not Fay or Hock. And she reports as widowed.

And in the 1930 Census, she’s with Harold R. Hock. But by 1940, she’s widowed. Again.

But if Dad’s records show her as divorced, is there a third husband out there between Davis and Hock?

I spent probably an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out who Mr. Davis was and where and how he died, or even if he died.

I eventually found their marriage license which gave me his first name, Oran. There was a lot of confusion because of variations in spelling. I kept finding vague references to being lost or buried at sea. But the dates didn’t seem to match up. One source said he was lost when the RMS Carpathia was sunk, but that made no sense. The only people who died were five engine crewmen, and the Oran Davis I was tracking was an artilleryman in the Army. I doubted he’d have been shoveling coal on a Cunard ocean liner.

I eventually located an Army casualty card that seemed to match up with the other information I had. But I couldn’t positively connect this Oran with my Alma…until I went through the newspapers.

Man, but I love the old society pages. People complain about how much information we share these days on social media, but Facebook and Instagram ain’t got nothing on the society pages of history. Are you trying to connect Mable in Topeka with a cousin in Dubuque? Check the society pages. Chances are very good you’ll find forty or fifty words about Mable’s recent visit. Check out this newspaper article about my great-grandfather.

So I found an article in Oran’s hometown paper about his marriage to young Alma. They married November 23, 1917, a Friday. The Marietta Monitor reported that they married at “the Grace Episcopal Church at Galveston last Friday and they departed immediately for Newport, Va., where the groom will continue his work in the service of Uncle Sam as a non-commission officer in the army.”

It must have been a whirlwind romance. Oran enlisted in May of 1917, went to Fort Sam Houston for training, then reported to Galveston for further training. By 15 January 1918, he was in Hoboken, New Jersey, boarding a ship to carry him to France.

By the 26^th, he was dead of pneumonia. They were married for 70 days.

So how is this a tangent? Doesn’t this sound like good old-fashioned genealogy work?

Well, yes, it is. But it’s a tangent because I’m only related to Oran by his ever-so-brief marriage to my cousin. And Alma wasn’t even a close cousin; she’s a second cousin once removed. Our common ancestor is Andrew Baldinger, my great-great-grandfather and her great-grandfather.

But stories like this, of a woman twice widowed and a marriage shorter than most engagements these days? These things seize my heart and send my imagination galloping off in wonder. Where did they meet? How did they fall in love so quickly? What thoughts did they have of the future? What plans did they make for after the war? Did they even talk about children?

Did she travel to New York with him? Their wedding story in the Marietta Monitor pretty much said she did. What must that train ride have been like? Newly married and together barely a few months, their lives and dreams stretched out before them.

And then he was gone. I know she visited her former in-laws at least twice in the following years. Did she tell them anything about her new beau, whom she married eight years after her first husband died?

Patterns

As I dig deeper in my family history, I find patterns emerging.

Oran H Davis (I haven’t yet figured out what the H stood for) was born in a small town in Texas called Whitewright, located on the eastern edge of Grayson County. It’s less than twenty miles from my hometown of Sherman.

Sherman is just about thirty-five miles from the town where Oran enlisted from: Marietta, Oklahoma. I grew up in Marietta, Ohio.

Odd, that.

How Far Do I Go?

Oran had three siblings. How much work do I do tracing them? How far up his ancestral line should I go? He and Alma had no children because they were barely married two months. He’s not directly related to me, so how much more research should I really do?

I probably won’t do much. I’ll add his parents and siblings to my tree, but I likely won’t do much more than that.

On the other hand…

I found mention in a short piece in the Marietta Monitor of a letter Oran wrote to the Red Cross, thanking them for their work in taking care of soldiers. It was signed by Sergeant O. H. Davis and others. But by the time he arrived in Hoboken to embark for France, he was a private. That does pique my curiosity more than a little bit. I know when I was a soldier in the 80s, it took a lot to get busted from sergeant to private, and it usually involved time in the stockade. Maybe things were different during the Great War, but I’m really curious about what happened.

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