Saturday: nothing at all

Obviously, the subject line is a complete lie. Let’s explore together! There will probably be updates, because it isn’t even 1 pm yet as I type this.

I did get many hours of sleep. I was worried at one point, because I had pretty bad pins and needles at around 7 am, but I got that squared away and zonked out again until 10. I checked my phone, and M. was interested in a walk, had not yet departed with her family to do other things, and it was below 80. So. Walk it is! No indoor visit, because T. vomited last night and honestly, I feel pretty garbage this morning. No nausea; just exhausted (despite the sleep!) and PND and related coughing. I have been regularly taking allergy meds (generic cetirizine), so this is a problem.

I ate breakfast. I got A. up and fed her breakfast. I told R. I wanted him to do _something_ with A. today because she’s feeling like the walls are closing in. We are past the mandatory mask phase, but I still don’t want to go to a movie because of the lingering coughing problem. She got dressed and I have no idea where they are going but they are now out of the house. I haven’t seen T. yet today. (ETA: he’s fine)

I vacuumed the master bedroom. I dusted it yesterday; it has been a long while, and can contribute to PND / coughing. I also stripped beds and started laundry. Being vertical is helping with the PND, but it is not gone, so I will probably do another Covid test. No fever or anything.

Eufy has done the upstairs hall and is now in the master bathroom; I vac’ed the small rugs in both the upstairs bathrooms. I’m starting to think that I really was having a lot of dust related problems. OTOH, it could just be that the physical activity is making my PND less bad — sometimes that happens. When that is the case, after I sit for 10 minutes, it’s usually back as bad or worse. We shall see! The covid test is definitely negative — 15 minutes have gone by, super clear C line, no T line. Woot. I guess.

That’s a lot of marriages

My son has been using my ancestry account and adding people who are related to some of his cousins. I thought, hunh, I could go poke around, add some stuff that is showing as a hint. As I was doing that, I noticed that there were some differences of opinions about the date of my aunt’s death (I had it wrong by a day, because I’d used a state death index date, and it was off slightly). I fixed that. I added some records. And then I got to looking at an uncle’s wife.

This was a wild one, because I didn’t realize this uncle had ever been married. The divorce occurred when I was about 4 and no one ever talked about his ex or her son thereafter. I only ran across this because I was looking at my baby book and systematically tracking down who everyone was who had sent a card and/or gift to my family when I was born. So: who is Audrey?

I found the marriage record, at the time, and I now have the divorce certificate (he filed, reason given was cruelty). I also found some other marriages for her in Washington State Digital Archives. But there were enough marriages that I got really confused. Also, I took a guess at what her name at death might have been and it turns out I got that wrong. I discovered that today, when I saw that someone who had grabbed things off of my tree had a Very Different Set of Facts for Audrey and my uncle (like: his middle named was spelled weird, among other things). I thought, all right, remove all the guesses and use the other person’s work and see if I can convince myself of anything.

After a few hours of this — highly, highly, highly interrupted, like by going to see Paws of Fury: the Legend of Hank, and also some random catch up conversations with my son — I have concluded that Audrey first married at the tender age 14, in Idaho, while living in Eastern Washington, to a man 11 years older than her. They had two kids. When the youngest of the two kids is 9, the kids and the father are living in Oregon, but Audrey is not with them. She is instead in Washington, and has been married to someone else for a few years. Basically, within a couple years of the birth of her second child, she’s married to a different man. That’s a little unexpected in the 1940s. Then again, remember, she’s still _really young herself_ — 22. I don’t know how long that marriage lasted. I next find her marrying a third man in 1955. She finally married my uncle in 1967, and they divorce in 1973. Her final — as near as I can tell — marriage is in 1979. I have no idea what happened to him.

5 marriages. That’s a very optimistic woman! To be fair, husband number 2 married two more times, and the second time, it was annulled due to failure to consummate (under 2 months from start to finish). For the most part, however, I’m not finding a ton of other repeaters.

While I was trying to figure out what happened after husband number 5, I ran across a obit for one of Audrey’s sisters who lived not too far from where Audrey wound up in northern California. I was a little startled to learn that at least one of Audrey’s sister’s was a JW (my uncle was a lifelong JW). Next project is probably to try to figure out whether this was a weird fluke, or if JWs are a theme.

ETA: I kinda failed to point out the best part of the story. 1935. 1943. 1955. 1967. 1979. 8 years between marriage 1 and marriage 2, but after that, every 12 years. Why?!? (The only time I have spotted a weird date pattern in marriages is with my grandmother and her preference for summer solstice adjacent weddings. Audrey’s got June twice, but other than that, Feb, April and August;, so no obvious pattern there.)