>Thank you, Sheila Block, for your very, very enlightening description of >the RC Church's attitude toward marriage, pre-1900! It goes a long way >toward explaining why I've had more success finding my great-GrandParents >marriage records in NYC archives than my GPs. My g-GPs were certainly >Protestants, Presbyterians most likely, while my GM was almost as >certainly Catholic and my GF either Protestant or Couldn't-care-less >Christian. Now the search is on for parishes in Manhattan and Brooklyn where, from Census data, I know my GPs lived at various times. Incidentally, Sheila, I'd have to say my own experience suggests the Church's attitude toward marriage extended well into the last Century and may have vestigial traces even today. Circa 1932, my mother, a devout RC from Pennsylvania, wanted to marry my previously married/divorced father in NYC and was rebuffed by the Brooklyn Diocese. She was threatened with ex-communication if she went ahead. Not until Dad discovered he'd been baptized RC but, after his father's [my Couldn't-care-less GF] early death and GM's re-marriage to another P or C-c-l C, had received little or no instruction in The Faith did the Church relent, annulling his first, secular, marriage and allowing them to marry in the Church. At that, it was a no-frills ceremony in the sacristy, a gratuitous disdain that rankled mother unto her final years. Dad C-c-l. And I remember quite clearly the emphasis of nuns, Xaverian brothers and later Jesuits during my schooling in the 1940s and 1950s on the horrors of mixed marriage and all the hoops our putative spouses would have to jump through if we decided to go down that path. As it happened, my first marriage, to another RC, bellied up after just a few years and my second, to a lovely C-c-l P from Ohio, is now in its 36th year. As we say in NYC, go figure. Best to all my fellow co-ethnicists and co-municipalists, George Alexander

George, Was your "experience" with the Xaverian Brothers in Brooklyn at Holy Cross or St Michael's? Vince