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Through knowledge of history, you can understand your family history better. |
| I love to do genealogy. In order to understand the lives of the families I discover, there is a lot of research that goes into the history surrounding them. This blog is a series of essays of the more in-depth research I have done into different topics. |
| It is amazing sometimes, how death can bring forward shocking secrets to the living. When a family friend recently passed away, a letter was found in her belongings hinting at three other marriages besides the two we had known about. Some divorced and some we were not too sure about. Upon further research, I found one other. Who knows how many there are under fake names, or weren't even legitimate, so not recorded? I love the lady still, she was a wonderful mother grandmother, and great-grandmother and will be greatly missed. Upon researching her past, I found a subculture of Los Angeles County and Las Vegas, Nevada that I never knew about. Since she recently passed away, I will only use first names as I dive into what I could discover about her relationships and what surrounded them. Elnora was born in 1935 in Riverside, California, but grew up in Long Beach, even so far as becoming a beauty queen in High School. Before even leaving high school, she became engaged to Donald, who even lived with her and her parents for a time before they got married. They married in September 1954 in Los Angeles, California. They moved to Houston, Texas, sometime after the birth of their son in 1955 and 1959. By 1960, she had moved back to her parents in Long Beach and divorced Don. Don went on to remarry a couple of years later in Las Vegas, remaining married to Patricia for the rest of his life in Texas. After her divorce, Elnora enters her wild days. There is a blurb in a Reno, Nevada newspaper of her living under her first husband's name, in Reno and applying for a marriage license with Almon, who also lived there. However, they didn't get married until November 1962. Whether that means the first marriage wasn't legit, or they never actually went through with the first marriage license, is a mystery for now. Out of curiosity, I began to research just who Almon really was. Born in Texas, my first connection to Elnora comes from the fact that he was also living in Long Beach in 1950. Elnora was young, Almon was actually nine years older than her. At the time he was married to Mabel and they had a one-year-old daughter. But this told me, that there was definitely the possibility of them knowing each other after she returned from Texas. Another hint to the fact that they knew each other, was that Almon worked in the same industry in 1950 as her first husband, driving an oil truck. Looking into him further, I discovered his birth certificate, knowing his birthdate from the marriage certificate with Elnora. In April 1945, he was married to Gertrude in Norfolk, Virginia, where he was stationed with the U.S. Navy. I then discovered from a newspaper article, that Almon was living in Las Vegas and applied for another marriage license with Lavina, who was living in Lomita, California a month after he married Elnora. What??????? Talk about a short-lived marriage. A quick Google search tells me that Lomita is just down Highway 1 from Long Beach. I doubt this is a coincidence. By looking at marriage and divorce indexes, I found six other marriages and divorces, although two of them could have been the same person married twice. I did look into each wife, but it is hard to trace women. I would have to get the marriage certificates to go any further. I believe that most of them are alive, however, and do not wish to delve further into their lives. I now turned to the next marriage for Elnora. A month after marrying Almon, she married Frank. In fact, she and Almon remarried in the same city, just a day apart! I could not find a divorce record for their marriage the month before, but not all records are indexed and online. I would have to fly to Nevada and do some digging in the archives. Looking into Frank, I have a feeling he led a very similar life to Almon. I found 22 marriages in Nevada with a combination of his name. I believe these marriages are from about three different Franks. Without ordering every certificate, however, I can not get a more accurate compilation of data. So, I turned to the next of Elnora's known marriages: Barry. The letter in her belongings did state that she was married to one other before this marriage, but with only a last name, I was not able to find it. Luckily, the marriage certificate for Barry's marriage had his date of birth on it. Certificates usually do. Barry was a fireman and seems to have only been married two other times from what I can tell. Even being a more sensible marriage, Elnora doesn't stay with him long as I can find no other record of them being together. Elnora only married one other man. Don was the big of her life, but even their marriage had some interesting twists. They were married in 1971 but then divorced a year later. They remarried in 1979 and stayed together until he died. Family lore also states that they married in Mexico at some point, but I have found no evidence of this. All these marriages make me wonder about the culture of the time. Was this a part of the hippie lifestyle here on the west coast? Unfortunately, we didn't find out about these other marriages until after her death and can no longer ask her. Some further research will definitely not go amiss! |
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