How many have had my experience. My GGrandmother had my grandfather before she married to my GGrandfather. He was about 50 years older than she was and his wife was dead. They did marry but I can not get any one from the first family to give me any information. This happened in 1850. ----- Original Message ----- From: Diane Hettrick To: nir-down@rootsweb.com Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2007 12:21 PM Subject: Re: [NIR-DOWN] I need to pick your brains=off topic I think we are all so interested in this because we have run into to similar situations in our research. As the ones digging around and asking the questions, we get onto some of the family secrets. I certainly know that I have. And those secrets make the research more challenging. Sometimes it's challenging because you know things you can't really publish in the family tree. I found a menage a trois in my family with the older children from the official husband and the younger children apparently from the unofficial husband. Then I have a story about two fathers switching babies at the hospital - one had a dead wife and one had a dead baby, so they matched them up. Or that may not be true at all. And the adoption stories. I know so many that were in-family adoptions pretending to be something else that I don't trust any "adoptions" any more - and I also don't discriminate against adopted family members as many do. And even when it's none of the above, the research puzzles that we run into are so similar to the challenges of finding birth parents that it's instructive. I'm thinking of one family where the wife was married three times to husbands who were married at least twice and trying to figure out whose children were whose and what their relation was is enough to make your head spin. Diane Diane Hettrick, dhettrick@earthlink.net May you ask the right question of the right person at the right time. ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to NIR-DOWN-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message

Your great grandmother may have been employed as housekeeper for the widower. It wasn't uncommon for that to lead to marriage either before or after the birth of a child. M Robinson.