Standard Legal Boilerplate - A Family Story

I’ve been trying to unravel a family story for the last couple of weeks. It’s one of those stories that I didn’t know a whole lot about when I was a kid, then slowly pieced together over time, and eventually fleshed out most of the details when I was an adult to get something coherent.

And then it got weird.

-er.

Weirder. It was a pretty strange story right from the start in some ways.

All of the principals in this story are long gone now as are most of the people who were even tangentially connected to them when these events happened, so I figure it’s something I can put down here. And honestly I find myself sneakily proud of my grandmother, the main person in the story, for living her life the way she wanted to live it, as best she could.

So here you go.

My dad’s side of the family was pretty small when I was growing up. There was my dad, of course. There was my grandmother (his mother), who lived with us for the last dozen years or so of her life. And there was my great-grandmother (my grandmother’s mother), who died when I was eight, which was why my grandmother came to live with us. I don’t remember her much – she and my grandmother lived in the last rowhouse before you got to the 69th Street Terminal, in Millbourne which was at the time a gritty little suburb of Philadelphia tucked between the city and Upper Darby, and mostly what I remember is an old woman in a bed and the fact that the front door faced the train tracks behind the house, not the street, so you could watch from the doorstep as the Market-Frankfort El rumbled by on its way to and from the terminal. It was neither elevated nor underground at that stage of the ride, as it would be at different points for most of its route. It was just a light rail line at one end of its journey through the city.

That was it. That’s all of the people on that side of the family that I have ever met, even to this day.

My dad, as far as I knew growing up, was an only child. I had no evidence to the contrary and no reason to suppose otherwise. Only children are a fairly common and unremarkable occurrence, after all.

My grandmother was not married at any time that I knew her and I never met any grandfather on that side of the family. I didn’t even find out my grandfather’s name until I was in high school and it made so little impression on my mind that it took me years to remember it again after that. My grandmother had a brother who married maybe three or four times but never had any kids, and a sister who had a son that my dad once described as “a toad, just like his father” so the son and his father both fell off the family radar long before I was born. The sister died before my parents even got married, something my dad blamed squarely on the stress caused by her husband and son. The brother died about a month after my great-grandmother did, but he had been running a motel in Florida for years by that point and I never met him. My mom only met him once, ironically enough at his mother’s funeral a few weeks before he died, and she said he seemed like a decent guy.

My great-grandfather seems to have been created out of pixie dust and table scraps and even now I can find very little about him on the genealogical sites. Certainly no family came from his side that I ever met. I know he started life as a blacksmith and ended up working for a company that made railroad locomotives.

My great-grandmother was the third of nine girls, and one of maybe two or three who ever had children of their own. My dad would tell stories of some of his great-aunts – especially Aunt Bertha (“Birdie”) who apparently had a sharp sense of humor – but by and large it was not a tight-knit family. “They weren’t dysfunctional,” my dad once told me, “but they weren’t close.”

At some point in your life, as you get older, there is a little switch in the back of your head that flips over and you find yourself saying, “Huh. Genealogy. That sounds like fun.” I hit this point in my early 40s or so, and eventually I managed to flesh out my grandmother’s story and add to the pieces that I’d discovered growing up.

Just a note, though, before proceeding. My grandmother led a very interesting life in many ways, and only some of them appear in this story. You had to know her.

My grandmother, Beryl, married Russell in early 1929 and they would go on to have four children, not just the one. There was Robert, born later in 1929. There were James and Phyllis, born in the early 1930s, both of whom died very young from things that could easily be prevented or cured today. And there was my dad, born in 1939. Beryl and Russell divorced in 1940. Russell took the oldest kid, Beryl took the baby, and neither side spoke to the other again.

Ever.

Please understand that at no time in the ensuing eight decades before the last one died did any of the four of them live more than twenty miles from any of the others. They could easily have kept in touch. But they didn’t.

The closest they came to doing so that I know of was a story my maternal grandmother told my brother of a day when she and my dad were in a shop in West Philadelphia, before I was born. At some point my dad took her aside and pointed to a man paying for his things at the cash register, told her that the guy was his father, and then just watched him walk out. This of course implies that my dad knew him on sight at least two decades after he’d left, which further implies a lot more stories that we’ll never know now. Much later, in a very different context, I asked my dad if he had ever thought about contacting his father. “No,” he said. “Never. What would I have had to say to the man?” Which is a fair question. Neither my dad nor his mother were ever really bothered about the guy that I knew of. He simply wasn’t part of their lives anymore and that was that. Nor was his son.

Beryl remarried in 1942 to a man named Charles, and on those few occasions where my dad would tell stories about his dad, it was Charles he was talking about. Charles was the guy who was there for him when he was growing up, after all. My mom met him a couple of times when she and my dad first started dating in high school. She said he seemed nice and treated her well. Charles died in 1959, and my grandmother never remarried after that.

That’s the story as I pieced it together from childhood stories and adult research. It’s got its odd moments, granted, but it’s fairly straightforward for all that.

So far, so good.

If you are going to do genealogy in this modern digital age you will end up on one of two websites, and probably both at one point or another.

The big one of course is Ancestry.com, which is run by the Mormon Church. The Mormons have this interesting little theological quirk that says if you convert to the Church you have a spiritual obligation to go back and retroactively convert all of your ancestors. This occasionally gets them into trouble (such as when they repeatedly try to do this to all the Jews who died at Auschwitz, which is an arrogantly messed up thing to do to people who were murdered for the religion they already had) but it is also why they have the best genealogical records on the planet, bar none. It’s one of the things that the young Mormons can do for their missions when they reach adulthood – most of them go off to proselytize the heathens (i.e. us) but no small number of them go out and dredge the world for records that they copy and bring back to Salt Lake City. If you’re going to do genealogy online you’re going to work with the Mormon Church, and Ancestry is as close to a win/win as you get – you get access to all those records and can build your genealogy to your heart’s content, and they get access to more records that people upload on their own while paying for the privilege, which saves them on missionaries. I for one am perfectly happy to make this trade.

The other is FamilySearch.org, which is basically Ancestry Lite. It’s the free teaser version of Ancestry that they use to get you hooked so you’ll move up to the big site and pay them their subscription fees, which worked like a charm on me so kudos to them for their marketing strategy. They do know their audience.

So I dipped my toe into the genealogical pool and opened an account on FamilySearch, and it works pretty much like Ancestry does. You can put up a family tree that can be private or available for others to see, you can add documents and stories, and you can contact people who seem to be barking up the same trees you are.

I ended up talking with a guy named Mark, who was doing research on Russell’s side of the family. Mark is some kind of nth-degree cousin of mine – if you go back five or six generations there’s a pair of siblings and Mark comes down from one of them and I come down from the other – and he turned out to be a pretty nice guy. He had a lot of information that I hadn’t seen before and I had some things that were new to him as well, mostly because I had the physical documents in my possession and had scanned them. We had a good conversation.

At some point, though, he sent me a scan of a clipping from one of the Philadelphia newspapers. It’s pretty standard legal boilerplate, the kind of thing you’d see in the Public Notices section of newspapers back when newspapers were a thing, the sort of notice you’d have to publish for three consecutive weeks so your court case could go to trial. “Russell hereby notifies Beryl that he intends to sue for divorce, and if she does not respond by such and such a date judgement will be entered against her blah blah blah blah blah.” That sort of thing. Standard legal boilerplate, insert names and dates here.

Except that it’s from 1962.

Now, there are a lot of weird things about this, not least of which being that in 1962 Russell knew damn well where to find my grandmother. She was living with her parents, in the same house where she had been living in 1928 when she and Russell had started dating. Russell knew exactly how to get hold of her and advertised in the newspaper instead.

As for the underlying issue, though, there are three possible alternatives here, each one funnier than the next and all of them entirely plausible if you knew my grandmother.

First, Beryl and Russell really were divorced in 1940.

In this alternative, Beryl did the whole Public Notification thing as above, got no response, had judgement entered against Russell as promised in the Notification, and never bothered to tell him anything about it. In which case Russell’s lawyer is about to make a very expensive discovery. I can see this happening, really I can. “Why should I tell him anything?” my grandmother would have said. “To hell with him and good riddance.” I can, in fact, imagine this in her voice in my mind even now.

Second, Beryl and Russell were not actually divorced in 1940 and my grandmother was married to two different men for seventeen years.

Again, entirely plausible. I come from a long line of people who had very little interest in or patience with bureaucratic niceties or legal requirements, and in an age where you had to do a fair amount of legwork to find records – physically going to the courthouse(s), searching through folders, locating paper documents, and so on – I can easily see my grandmother just cutting Russell out of her life, forgetting entirely or simply ignoring the entire issue of whether they were still married or not, and then going on to get married to Charles. Russell was over as far as she was concerned, paperwork or no. If Charles wanted to get married, why not?

For corroboration of this basic attitude, consider that one of the first things that Mark did after we connected on FamilySearch was to send me all the information he had on my grandmother and ask me to check it for accuracy. I looked it over and said it was all correct except that he had her birthday wrong – it was August 9th, not August 10th. “But her birth certificate says the 10th,” he replied. “I’m sure it does,” I told him. “But I lived with the woman for a dozen years and her birthday was the 9th.” I’m pretty sure I know what happened. Either my great-grandparents filled out the form incorrectly because they couldn’t remember the date (it was a big day, after all) or just made a mistake, or they forgot about the form entirely and had to go back later to fill it out because some humorless official demanded they do so and then got the date wrong, and either way they couldn’t be arsed to change it. Beryl’s here, isn’t she? What does it matter what the form says?

Also, this is the same family where my dad had to take three weeks of shore leave from the United States Navy to sort out who owned the family house in West Philadelphia. It had been in the family for generations by that point. The original owners had bought it in the 1870s or 80s, and then they died and passed it down and those people died and passed it down and no one ever bothered to change the title so it was still legally owned by people who had died several decades and at least two generations of residents ago. The taxes were paid and the property was well maintained, so what did the title matter? Sorting that out with the city was an experience, my dad said.

So yeah, my grandmother being legally married to two different men and not giving a damn about it is absolutely within the realm of possibility.

Third, Beryl and Russell were not actually divorced in 1940 and my grandmother was just shacking up with Charles. For almost two decades. In the 1940s and 1950s, when such things Simply Were Not Done.

And yes, this too is entirely plausible. My grandmother was not terribly concerned with what other people thought of her life choices and by “not terribly concerned” I mean "not concerned at all."  She could in fact be rather contrary about them. She was a pack-a-day smoker from the time she was 17, during the Harding Administration, to the day she died in 1986. She smoked Benson & Hedges Gold, which she would send me down to the local pharmacy to buy for her and which, this being the 1970s, they’d happily sell to a 9-year-old boy, and she once told my brother that the entire reason she started smoking was because someone told her not to. Also, she worked outside the home for her entire adult life, she went by her middle name and hated her first name enough that she somehow managed to avoid having it appear on her Social Security records, and she had a very clear moral code that did not involve her getting too worried about other people’s choices or understanding why they should care about hers. Seven years into her marriage to Russell she got hit by a trolley in West Philadelphia and, according to the newspaper story that appeared the next day, when questioned by the police she gave them her own last name (not Russell’s), an age that was several years younger than she actually was, and an address that turned out to be a greenhouse. What business of theirs was any of that? She was who she was, and I have to admit I have always admired her for that.

The idea that she would decide that her personal life was not someone else’s to regulate or comment upon would have been entirely within character for her.

I first discovered all this when Lauren was about sixteen, and her immediate reaction to it was “Wow. Grandmom was a playa!” And I suppose she was, in her time. She had game. She did what she felt was right by her standards, and if that wasn’t the usual practice of the day well that could easily be defined as Someone Else’s Problem.

This story has percolated in the back of my mind for a number of years now, but for some reason I have recently been spending some time trying to get to the bottom of it. What actually happened? Which of these three alternatives is the one that they lived through?

There’s nobody left to ask, though.

Russell died in 1978 and Robert in 2019 or 2020 without any contact with us at all. My brother and I did look into finding Robert at one point – it’s astonishing what information you can find online if you care to search – but on further consideration it didn’t seem like a great idea (“What would we have to say to the man?”) and we let it drop. Beryl died in 1986. Both of my maternal grandparents died in 2000. My dad died in 2016 and my mom in 2021. They’re all gone and the web of stories and relationships in which they lived is gone with them. All that is left are the documents and photographs.

None of these people made much of an impression on the genealogical websites that I can find. Some, but not much. There are census records, for example, but those stop at 1950. I have Charles’ death certificate, which does list my grandmother as his wife, but I have not yet found any marriage record for them nor any divorce records for her and Russell, not even in 1962. You can’t prove something by absence, of course, and it is always possible that the records are there and I’ll find them eventually. But all of these people remain to this degree elusive, confined to a time that has long since passed. My dad and my grandmother (and to some extent my great-grandmother) live on in my memories, of course, but the documents remain an as yet unexplored territory.

So for now it’s a story, or rather a set of possible stories, and there is something to be said for that as well.