I had this grand idea at the beginning of the week for a post about how an atheist celebrates Easter. What could be more appropriate for a post on Easter Sunday, right?
I was about 500 words into it and I realized I just couldn’t do it.
Why not?
It amounted to realizing that that’s not really my whole voice thing here. I’ll talk about religion still, but I don’t want to make it the entire point of a post. Plus, I could feel myself getting a little wound up, and when I do that, I end up bashing on things and people, and again, that’s not something I want to do here. I’ll criticize, but I don’t want to bash.
So what’s on the agenda for this post? Genealogy fun.
Young Love
I’ve been researching my mom’s family which includes the Baldingers and the Bleikes. Back in 1840, Edward Emile Baldinger married Annie Louise Bleike, in Galveston, Texas. Their son, Edward Bleike Baldinger, married Rebecca Florence Smith. Their daughter Beatrice was my mom.
At any rate, while I have an active subscription to Newspapers.com, I’ve been searching and clipping articles about my extended family. That’s where I find the stories behind the dates and names. The other day, I searched all of Texas for “Bleike,” rather than putting a first name in the search. I’ve found that in the 19th century, it was common to use someone’s initials rather than their first name.
Such was the case here. I found lots of advertisements, because the Bleikes (and the Baldingers, for that matter) were merchants for the most part.
But I also found an interesting 1880 article in the Dallas Daily Herald about one of my ancestors.
I wasn’t sure he was an ancestor, at first. The article gave the name W. T. Bleike, and the only person I had whose initials matched up was William T Bleike. But he was 43 years old in 1880, which meant he couldn’t be the W. T. Bleike in the article, because the story hinged on him not being 21 years old at the time.
Back then, in Texas, at least, when a couple got married, the groom had to be at least 21 and the bride had to be at least 18 years old. The parents could grant permission were either party younger than required, but as I understood it, both sets of parents had to consent. Of maybe just the bride’s parents.
At any rate, young Miss Julia Gonzales’ father was not about to consent to this marriage, so Julia and W. T. eloped, with the latter swearing that both parties were of age.
When the elder Gonzales learned of the transgression, he went to a judge who signed a warrant, and W. T. (who is almost certainly William T Bleike, Jr.) spent at least a few days in jail.
The frustrating part about all of this is that I couldn’t find any other articles about the couple, in the Dallas, Houston, or Galveston papers. I did learn via Find-A-Grave that Julia died in 1928, and that the couple had at least two children. Assuming Julia passed first, they stayed married 48 years when she died, despite the turbulent beginning of their marriage.
I haven’t yet found any burial records for her husband.
Why did Joseph Gonzales object to the relationship though? That’s the primary unanswered question for me. W. T. was part of a good-sized German family. His father immigrated thirty years prior, and the family was well-established in the region.
I suspect the main issue involved the kids’ ages. They were both relatively young in a time when one just didn’t marry at that age.
Where’s that time machine when you need it?
The Writing
The way the article was written was almost as interesting as the story itself. I don’t know what passed for wire services back then, but someone in Galveston thought the story noteworthy enough to pass it on to whatever regional news clearinghouse existed back then.
The article appeared in a section of the Herald dedicated to stories around the region, including Lancaster, Fort Worth, Rockwall, Weatherford, and Galveston. Each section got a location header, then the news appeared below, usually with double em-dashes separating the stories. This particular page had no paragraph breaks at all.
And oh, the writing. There’s no way such an article would get past the editors of today, I’d think. I can’t imagine anyone using the word “intercourse” this way without outraging thousands of readers.
There are times I wish I’d been born a hundred years sooner.
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