The Family Tree

My sister sent me a link to a new website for the State of West Virginia.
"Thanks, now I won't get anything of real value done for the rest of the day!" I told her.
There was a wealth of historical information to be found there.

In just over an hour, I downloaded Marriage "Contracts" and licenses all the way back to my
ggg Grandfather and Grandmother, in 1808.
The listings by the county clerk in the registers for that year were also there.

I learned that in olden days, it was indeed a contract between the groom to be, and his father in law, or the eldest living brother. The contract was with the Commonwealth of Virginia, in the name of the current governor.
The price of said contract? $150.00, serious money in that day.
Instead of receiving a Dowry, as it was in the old country the young husband had to do this in order to show that he was financially stable enough to support the woman.
If he hadn't been working long enough to save the cash, he didn't walk the man's little girl down the aisle, so to speak.

The ages listed on the license normally reflected that.
My ggg grandfather Joshua Harvey was 23, Sarah Swope, the matriarch of my direct line was only sixteen.
Their son James S. Harvey (my fathers name sake) was 22, his bride Eliza Cummins was
only 17. It took a young man that long to save that amount of money in order to marry.

As time marched on, and the contract was now only a marriage license the age of the woman advanced.
In fact, my grandmother Ollie Pearl Garten was 23, and my Pa Pa was only 22!
My great grandmother Louisa Baumgardner Harvey was very young at marriage though.
She was only 30 when she died after a difficult child birth. The child did not survive either.
My great Aunt Liza was only twelve at the time, and she helped with my granddad, who was six, and with his little brother Hobart who was one until she herself married at the age of seventeen.
My great grandfather never remarried, which tells me a lot about his love for his young wife.
It was commonplace for a man to quickly remarry in that day, especially when he had young children.
He raised the boys with the help of his married daughter, and later served as Sheriff in Monroe County. He died just before my father was born in 1921, living to see most of his grandchildren.

Seeing the flowing, formal cursive handwriting on these documents, with the names, ages and witnesses from the family of people I've heard about, and in some cases known as elderly was awesome.
I know the exact dates now of all of their nuptials.
One can easily imagine them as hopeful, excited youngsters, eager to set out on their own, much as we all have done.

Sarah and Joshua had seventeen children who survived to adult hood.
There were several sets of twins.
Most of them lived through the Civil War. Indeed, the men fought in it.
They were both blessed with a long life, even by today's standards.

I once met an elderly gentleman when I was in High School in 1970.
His name was Richard Harvey, and he and my Grandfather were third cousins.
He was a veritable wealth of information, lucid, articulate and engaging.
He remembers as a child meeting James S. Harvey, he knew my ggrandfather John S. Harvey well, and also knew several of his great Aunts and Uncles as very elderly people.
Joshua and Sarah's children and grandchildren!
Some of them were still living early in the twentieth century.
My dad told me later that he was 99 years old when I talked to him!

I have since confirmed everything he told me in his oral family history.
These recent documents added to my paper trail of documentation too.

Ah, but I love family detective work!