Regarding Civil War era marriages...I have the same situation in my family. I have found a boy and a girl in the 1840 census from two seperate families growing up in the same hollow. Then I find my great grandmother's death certificate with the boy's name listed as her father (my great grandmother was born in 1862). When I look at the 1870 census, I find the man,with a wife, with children born in odd years (1863, 1865, 1867, 1869), and my great-great grandmother with 3 daughters born in the even years (1862, 1864, 1866). They never married. The only way I figured it out was his listing on the death certificates for the daughters. He was a captain in the Confederate army, she was from a Union family. I have always assumed a romantic forbidden affair....he may have just been a letch, who will ever know.