More Gertrude - 2

I was recently sent a very nice photograph of Gertrude Seibert in her wedding dress. It illustrates the need to check information carefully, and ideally get more than one line of evidence for a conclusion.

On the rear of the photograph is the caption

There is a problem with this. Getrude’s marriage certificate survives, and shows that as Gertrude Woodcock she married Robert Seibert on September 18, 1890. Robert was a wealthy railroad man, who left her very well provided for when he died in 1913.

Robert Seibert c. 1909 from a newpaper photograph

The photograph could of course have been taken a year after the wedding – the sort of thing a wife might just do if her husband was foolish enough to forget their anniversary, but it really doesn’t look like that sort of photograph.

The clue I believe is in the caption “Our dear Sr. GW. Seibert.” Gertrude didn’t become “our dear Sister Seibert” to anyone until a number of years after her marriage. Her first poem did not appear in Zion’s Watch Tower until 1899, and her high profile stems more from the early twentieth century, with involvement in Daily Heavenly Manna (1905), Poems of Dawn (1912) and her own Sweet Briar Rose (1909) and In the Garden of the Lord (1913).

The simplest answer is that whoever wrote the caption for the photograph got it wrong. It would be an easy mistake to make many years after the event, especially if the writer was not in direct contact with Gertrude to check. But it shows the importance of researchers today checking and double checking everything they find. If they can.

Gertrude’s special contribution to Watch Tower history is probably her involvement behind the scenes in the production of the controversial volume The Finished Mystery (1917). Two or three posts down this blog you will find the story in the article: Gertrude and the Finished Mystery.