On this day…
117 years ago,
my maternal great grandparents,
William Oscar and Una June
were married in Jasper, Missouri.
William was 23,
Una was only 16.
Una’s mother, Nancy, offered her approval.
There are no known photos of
the two of them together,
nor have I ever seen
a photo of William,
and so my imagination is all I have
of how they may have looked together,
of how joyous their union
may have been.
I think about their marriage often,
about their two children,
a daughter born 16 months after their union
and a son,
my Grandpa Phil,
seven years later.
I also often think
about their divorce,
sometime before 1921,
when Una began her second marriage
and birthed a second daughter
in Oklahoma before moving
to California after being rather quickly widowed.
William, holding steady in Missouri,
must have simply
began again,
though I don’t believe he ever re-married.
There were trains to conduct
and Deputy Sheriff duties to complete.
There is so much I don’t know
yet
about this union,
their relatively short time together,
or how it ended
and so I will keep searching,
because I feel in my bones
that there is much more to their stories
than has been uncovered
or written
to date.
Onward,
Melis