This is a Message Board Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Classification: Query Message Board URL: http://boards.ancestry.com/mbexec/msg/an/Qi3.2ACIB/1767 Message Board Post: I have no relation to this family but I had to share this loose newspaper article I found in a old book I purchased on Ebay. It is so full of good family info. I do not know which newspaper it came from nor is a date listed anywhere on it. Most of the newspapers I got were from Rochester or Buffalo NY around 1900-1905. ****************************** Nordica To Wed Capt De La Mar New York, Oct 28- Mme Nordica will shortly become the bride of Captain Joseph Raphael de la Mar. This has been learned on good authority. The report electrified society and stageland, and writes a new chapter in one of the strangest romances of this country. It entangles two lives already filled with romantic interest. The elder Dumas could hardly have penned a more absorbing story than that which brings together the former sailor and diver and now millionaire and the woman who has earned the greatest laurels of the operatic stage. Captain de lar Mar is hurrying to completion the great mansion at Madison avenue and 37th street which was begun as the gift to the former Mrs. De la Mar, whose beauty was such as to win the tribute of Paris as well as New York. It is to this metropolitan palace that Captain de la Mar is expected to escort his bride. Until recently he has not been in the house for years. Captain de la Mar was divorced from his former wife several years ago, and she is now married to Jas. R. Hatmaker, who was for a long time the secretary of Cornelius Vanderbilt, and from whom he recieived a large gift of money several years ago. A strong friendship has existed between Captain de la Mar and Mme. Nordica for several years, but the first intimation of the engagement was received last week when Mme. Nordica resigned the part of ?Sulamith? the rejected bride in Goldmark?s ?Queen of Sheba?, which will open the season of grand opera in this city in November. It now appears that her reason for this action was the near approach of her wedding. Mme. Nordica was divorced from her second husband, Zoltan Doehme, in January 1904. She had met him in 1894 when she was singing?Elsa? in ?Lohengrin? at Bayreuth. Doehme, a young Hungarian tenor, was also singing in Bayreuth that year and the romance reached its climax when he married Mme Nordica in Indianapolis May 27, 1897. When Nordica finally resolved to secure a divorce from Doehme, she alleged that he had squandered $300,000 of her money. Mme. Nordica was born in Farmington, ME and was married to her first husband, Frederick Gower, an American in 1883. She was then Lillian Norton. This matrimonial venture was an unhappy one, however, and in 1887 she began suit for divorce. The suit never reached a legal conclusion, however for Frederick Gower?s disapearance at that time introduced a remarkable complication into the affair. He ascended in a balloon in England to make a trip across the channel and was never seen again. His disappearance was one of the most mysterious in the annals of aerostation, and to this day no one has ever discovered what strange end there was to the balloon voyage. In the course of time he was declared legally dead and Mme. Nordica was declared a widow in the eyes of the law. Captain de la Mar?s history is far more rugged in its romantic interest. He has been called, not inaptly, the American Monte Cristo. He began life as a sailor immigrant to this country. Later he became a diver and quit the hazardous profession after being confined under a wrecked ship for 12 hours. He then went west, was a butcher, a real estate dealer and a miner. While lacking luck as a prospector, he was successful as a purchaser of mining claims and the Wilson mine in Idaho, bought by him, has turned out to be one of the richest producers in this country. It is believed that his fortune is now at least $25,000,000. Some years ago while in New York Captain de la Mar met Nellie Virginia Sands and shortly after married her. She was a woman of striking beauty, and the married life of the pair was happy for some time. It is true that her bathing suit shocked Newport and that in Paris, where they finally took up their residence, the girl of 20 desired a livelier experience than her 50 year old husband regarded as proper. But it was not until he found in her desk a number of letters written by another man that he began suit for divorce. After the divorce had been granted he returned to this country with his 6 year old daugther and for a time took a deep interest in sending collectors to all parts of Europe to find articles of historic fitness for the various rooms in his handsome mansion he was erecting on Madison avenue. He took but little interest in the house himself however and rarely visited it turning over to decorators the work of furnishing it with materials collected by him. Two weeks ago, however, he began hurrying up the work, distributing among the decorators cigars wrapped in $5 bills as incentives to greater industry. Recently he and his daughter moved in to the two upper floors and it is said that as soon as the decorators have concluded their work he will marry Mme. Nordica.