We Get Comments

This blog invites comments on historical matters, but sometimes receives responses of a highly speculative and negative nature. As indicated in the blog heading, these normally just get deleted. But a recent comment was forwarded to me on an old post that I wrote elsewhere way back in 2012. It raised questions that crop up from time to time related to Joseph Lytle Russell and Emma Ackley and their marriage.

This post is to address the issues, although I’m not going into great detail as researchers can easily check matters out for themselves. On THIS blog the material was covered in general detail in the article

https://jeromehistory.blogspot.com/2020/04/1-three-weddings-but-no-funeral-this.html

The issues relate to the 1880 census return for Allegheny. This establishes that over a year after CTR and Maria married, JLR and Emma were still single but living in the Russell household. The census return for their street, Cedar Avenue, is dated June 14, 1880. It is reproduced below.

The reproduction is not very clear, but deciphering it shows the following:

There are four occupants of the house, C T Russel (sic), married, occupation: merchant; Maria F, married, wife, keeps house; J L, widowed, father, occupation: merchant; and E H Ackley, single, sister (step), occupation: at home.

The relationship entry for Emma as recorded in the schedule is incorrect. Her relationship to the head of the household (CTR) at this time should be sister-in-law.

The issues raised in the comment are basically threefold.

1.           Did Joseph and Emma ever actually marry?

2.           What was going on in that house with four of them there?

3.           How to explain the difference in ages between Joseph and Emma?

The writer starts with a confident statement: “I’m good at genealogical investigations and I cannot find any record that indicates that Joseph Russell and Emma Ackley married.”

I would agree there is no apparent record. But there is a good reason for that which any genealogist should know. The State of Pennsylvania did not require marriages to be officially registered until 1885, and “common law” marriages continued to be “common” for years thereafter. If you married before then, generally your immediately family would know, and maybe the officiating minister might keep his own personal record or a specific church might do so. However, no-one else would know unless you put it in the newspaper or had legal matters to attend to. If you wanted a “quiet” wedding, it really was quiet.

To illustrate the situation, perhaps readers can find an official document for CTR and Maria’s marriage? Like Joseph and Emma’s, it is just not there. But we know it happened because they chose to put an announcement in the local paper and CTR was sufficiently well known in Allegheny for it to make a short paragraph in the papers as well. Both the Pittsburgh Gazette and Pittsburgh Post (March 14, 1879) carry news of the marriage at the home of Maria’s mother the day before with J H Paton officiating.

As an aside, this lack of documentation did not just apply to marriages. You will not find a primary source for J F Rutherford’s birth in 1869. When he needed to renew a passport, his mother Lenora, had to extract a reference from a family Bible and sign an affidavit to that effect. There were no other records extant.

Returning to Emma, when it came to JLR’s last will and testament, part was queried by Emma who believed that as his wife she should have inherited more. In the documented arguments he is the husband and she is the wife. Joseph’s obituary found in several newspapers calls her his wife. It is easy enough to check.

The second criticism is that it was somehow strange for the four to all be in the same house. The writer hints at misconduct without a shred of evidence.

I am not going to even dignify this with much comment, other than to say that I see no problem with the four people living under the same roof in the snapshot of June 1880 for Cedar Avenue. I’ve visited Cedar Avenue and the houses are large. Years later Maria was able to take in a number of lodgers in one.

Why were they in the same home? Well, why not? CTR and Maria were close at this time, committed to their religious work. Emma and Maria were very close and would spend the last decades of their lives together. CTR and his father Joseph were very close. There would be nothing surprising about them being under the same roof at some point, and that may well have led to the two unattached becoming a married couple. As already noted the property was large with plenty of space.

We do not know how long they were all at same address. The census is simply a snapshot of one day, June 14, but one can assume that any marriage came quite soon after that date since Emma’s daughter Mabel appears to have been conceived around December that year.

The December date comes from Mabel being born in September 1881, and that can be confirmed from her marriage certificate when she married Richard Packard in 1903. It gives her birth date as September 1881 but does not give the actual day. If she was born in September 1881, then obviously she was conceived around December 1880. That would be 5-6 months after she and Joseph were living under CTR’s roof while both single. That gives us a window of a few months for a marriage.

We might here note that to try and bolster slurs against Charles and Joseph, the writer comments on the period June-December 1880 with an off-the-wall statement: “That does not leave a lot of time for the two (Joseph and Emma) to fall madly in love and wed.” What sort of logic is that? Who is to say they didn’t “fall in love” some time before the census, and were at the same address on census night planning the wedding for the following week? We just don’t know. We certainly have no basis for filling in the gaps with supposition.

When married, and after a baby came along, it would make more sense for the couple to look for a separate home (and in fact the property next door came into the family’s possession at some point). But they continued to live near each other for some years until Joseph eventually retired to Florida, along with Emma and Mabel.

The suggestion that there was something amiss about all of this is a huge leap of imagination with an obvious agenda. They were all close at the time. It is very sad what happened later.

The third issue raised is the disparity in ages. Why would a woman in her 20s want to marry a man in his 60s?

This is not a unique situation. Just look around in the world of entertainment and politics today. As it happens, the same occurred in my own extended family. But back in the 1880s an obvious reason for a woman was to be provided with stability and financial security. That is something I venture the Ackley girls were always most concerned about by their later actions. And as a potential bonus, Emma was able to have a child, which may have been very important to her.

So, whoever chose to make the comments referenced above, please leave such speculation alone. And if you can’t do that, just don’t send it here.