One of my cousins on my mother’s side of the family has a genealogy website with a very detailed family tree. The other day I was looking though it and noticed that my grandmother was younger than I thought she was and was only 17 when she married (grandpa was 19). Also they married in some random town out-of-state. This afternoon at my niece’s graduation party I asked my mother about it. Turns out they eloped because grandma was underage and would’ve need parental consent (as well as a blood test). Her wedding dress was just a normal Sunday dress with a lace curtain she stole from her parent’s parlour pinned in her veil as hair and a cabbage * bouqet! Oh, and after the wedding she got so sick and started vomiting they had to drive back home and spend their wedding night in her house. After much pleading grandpa was allowed to sleep on the living room couch. I never knew that.
Andybody else have interesting stories about their grandparents (or parents) weddings or courtships?
*Yes, I checked; my uncle wasn’t born until 11 months later.
Reported, because I don’t think you intended to pit your grandparents for eloping.
Goddamnit, Grandma, you whore!
I laughed out loud. Very rare occurrence from reading a one liner on SD :).
My paternal grandfather was born in 1876, his bride-to-be about 1900. I’ve always wondered just what their story was but never learned it. Both from the same small town in upstate New York, although he’d been to the big city and graduated from Columbia University while she was busy being born.
Bet old Grandad would’ve liked Pattaya. 
I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess the OP meant this for MPSIMS instead of the Pit. Off like a bride’s nightie!
On doing genealogical research, I found out that my great-grandfather was born about seven months after his parents’ marriage. I suspect my great-great-great grandfather, a Civil War veteran, may have been keeping his old rifle in the back of the closet and put it to use.
I found out that my grandma, who was 15 years younger than grandpa, was not his first wife. When he was a teenager he had been married before to another teenage girl. She died before they had any children.
That in itself was not surprising, what was surprising is that it all started with a visit grandpa made to relatives living across country (a big undertaking in the beginning of the last century), and he met this girl, but they merely exchanged words. After he was back home, this girl showed up with her father, she said that my grandfather had promised to married her (he denied ever doing that). Returning the girl would have been an insult to her family, so off they went down the isle. She died within a year (of natural causes).
Grandpa never, ever mentioned her to any of us. My mom knew from my grandma’s side of the family. It was a weird deal.
My great-grandmother surprised me twice. First, she bore a child out of wedlock in the nineteen-teens in rural south Georgia. Never named the father to anyone, as far as I know. Great-grandmother was in her late twenties at the time, and had spent years raising her younger siblings by then, and I guess she finally decided that it was time for her to have some sort of life of her own choosing. Later, she married the man who would be my great-grandfather (and he, to his credit, raised my great-grandmother’s child as though she were his own.) After my great-grandfather’s death, my grandmother finished raising her children and then remarried. She divorced her second husband (around 1945, when divorce was still a scandalous thing in rural parts) because he was lazy. Definitely a liberated lady, far ahead of her time!
My father’s oldest sister had a shotgun wedding, but apparently, to the wrong man. Seems that when she was in her late teens, Aunt B. was seeing two men - one near her own age, and another older man (who had been divorced from his first wife - this would have been around 1951, and divorce was still not very respectable.) My grandfather had the older man arrested, based on my aunt’s young age. When my aunt learned she was pregnant, my grandfather had to go bail the groom out of jail so that they could marry. Fast forward 5 or 6 months after the wedding, and the baby looks absolutely nothing like my aunt, anyone in her family, her groom, nor anyone in his family. Oops! (Don’t know whether it’s a happy ending or not: Aunt and uncle were married for 53 years, until his death last winter, and had three younger children. The marriage never struck me as very happy, but I think they did love one another.)
My grandfather was in the army in WW1 when he received a balaclava knitted by a person in some welfare society back in Australia. She included her name in it and she became my grandmother (eventually).
On the other side of the family, my great grandmother was a 16 year old girl when my great grandfather knocked her up. She lost her two eldest sons in the Great War and also her husband passed away. (According to my father she was an old bitch- worse than his mother. Dad is now almost 90 and remembers her well.).
Since my ancestors were all peasants in Poland before coming to the US in the early 1900s, there’s not a lot to be found about anyone before the immigrants. And my mother wasn’t one to share the scandalous secrets, so I didn’t find out till many years later that:
[ul]
[li]Paternal grandfather had been married before my grandmother, but his first wife died.[/li][li]Paternal grandfather’s brother lived with a woman but they never married.[/li][li]My dad’s oldest sister’s daughter (my cousin) is not the child of my uncle.[/li][li]Dad’s second sister married a man she’d only known a few weeks.[/li][/ul]
Yeah, I know, ho-hum… But apparently we were not supposed to know that our family was less than stereotypical white-picket-fence perfection. And my generation continued the scandals with 5 divorces, one child out of wedlock, two unable to reproduce, and of course, my elopement after 4 whole weeks of dating.
And I just noticed that all of these “scandals” are about Dad’s side of the family. I wonder what Mom has kept hidden…
I always thought, considering the way aunt idealize her mom and her marriage to her dad (my grandparents), that they had been very religious and married before living together.
Not so, my grandpa told mom some time before he died, when he was recounting stories of his youth. They lived together without being married for a while, and eloped because granny’s uncle got angry and insisted they married. Oh yea, and granny was in her early-mid 30s at the time, but I knew that before. Grandpa was a few years younger. Go granny!
Granny’s mom, although barely able to read, if at all, was good with numbers and at some point ran a store with her husband, and continued after her husband died. Her youngest daughter was born out of wedlock, from an affair she had with a married man. Only one of my great aunts and uncles on that side to not have the same last name combo.
A great-grandfather on dad’s side was the product of an affair between a 17 year old rich kid and a 22 year old laundrywoman. He was eventually given to his paternal aunts to be raised, and seldom saw his mom after that.
His wife, my great-grandmother, has also a torrid family history. Seems like her father had different “families”, and never married his baby mamas. I think all of the families, or at least a couple of them (great-granny and another group) were recognized in his will (I don’t think he denied paternity). And the town knew which ones were his kids (and mistresses, I suppose).
My great great grandmother married her third husband on the 30th of June, 1883, when she was 37 and he was 70. Their son was born on the 12th of July, 1883. Her husband’s first wife had died in December 1882.
It took me years to find the marriage record because my great great grandmother’s unusual first name was (understandably) mangled by the person transcribing the handwritten records in the index of marriages, and because I didn’t realise she’d had two prior husbands so I was looking under the wrong surname. At one point I’d given up hope of finding a record of marriage for my great great grandparents, and I said to my Grandfather “I think your father may have been illegitimate”. He got all huffy and said “He didn’t go to school all that long but he could read and write!”. Hehehe. Anyway, turns out he wasn’t illiterate or illegitimate; his parents were married for nearly two whole weeks before he was born!
My grandparents eloped pretty much like the OPs did. Grandma was underage so she and grandpa went with two of their friends to West Virginia for the day and got married at the Justice of the Peace.
Grandpa is fine with talking about it, though. It’s not a secret. It wasn’t until they were married and had kids that the pair became super-religious. I suspect they forgave themselves for not getting married in a church 
My grandmother was the cook for a well to do apothecary. My grandfather was the eldest son of a preacher man.
My grandfather, quite a good looking and cultured young man was putting himself thru college by being paid for his company by the bored and well off housewives of the town. And I guess even cooks get lonely.
I have only met the man twice, he never wanted much to do with his kid or grandkids and I was very young when he died so I never knew him. But going by the books he left he had a very good education.
Does this count as “courtship”?
My great grandmother was sent to work as a domestic in town at what we would now call a shockingly young age. She was impregnated by the master of the house and delivered her daughter at 15. The child was given to a married couple in town, everyone knew the whole story. My GGM was sent to the US, the poor soiled dove, to meet my future GGF. The child her bore first, kept in touch by mail all my GGMs life.
My grandfather, who died when my mom was 5-6, was apparently either married or seriously involved with another woman before my grandmother. A woman claiming to be his daughter showed up at my grandmother’s house.
I’m enjoying reading the family secrets, but this made me laugh and laugh:
My maternal grandparents got married within a few days of meeting each other. They were both on leave in the second world war, he from the Royal Engineers, she from the WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force). They got married in their uniforms (the best clothes they had), and had their wedding reception in the cafe at Woolworths. I love this image of them sitting there, all smart and handsome in their uniforms, holding hands over the table at the Woolie’s cafe.
However, this hasty marriage might explain the bitterness, separation, and violence that was their thirty-year marriage.
My parents were divorced. Not unusual. My mother’s parents were divorced. Unusual, but not weird. Her mother’s parents were divorced. Really unusual - the divorce had to be granted by the queen. Her mother’s mother’s parents were divorced - so unusual that they were among the first people in the entire country to be divorced and not be aristocrats, though they were friends of the Queen.
So, basically, I come from a long line of divorcees.
Not a direct ancestor, but there is a story in my paternal grandmother’s family that I enjoy, told to me by my father’s sister.
There was a young woman in the family who fell in love with a sailor. Now, this was back in the day when a sailor was considered the scum of the earth. The family wouldn’t hear of it, of course, and while the sailor was away at sea (where else?) set up a marriage with a more appropriate, although boring, suitor. I think he was a grocer or a haberdasher or some such thing.
Anyway comes her wedding day and she looks out her bedroom window and walking down the street is her sailor. She sneaks out of the house, meets him and tells him what’s going on. A little while later she is leaving the house with a suitcase. An uncle notices and asks what she’s doing. Oh, taking this suitcase down to the train station. So he helped her carry it. Flash forward, and of course she is MIA, having left town with the sailor on the train.
The pity is, whn I asked my aunt what happened next, she says oh, she married the sailor. And then what??? Nothing. She married the sailor. But were they happy? What did the jilted grocer do? Did her family disown her? Did she even return to town, or go live somewhere else? But that’s all there is of the story.
My Granny was the oldest daughter of 13 children in a tiny mining town in West Virginia. The family did place a big emphasis on education, and quite a few of the kids were sent to Marshall College for a year, whenever they could afford it. There, she met my Pappaw.
Since she had a teaching job lined up for the next year, and they would need money, they decided to get secretly married, and let her go back home and teach for a year. He stayed in Huntington, and she was a couple of hours away. She used to go down for the weekend to visit her sister who was at Marshall next, all the time. Sister was in on the secret, so she didn’t stay with her, but ran off to hotels with her husband!
She told me that one time, he came to visit her at her parents house, and her dad got very upset when he caught them holding hands!
Finally, after they’d been married about 6 months, Granny decided to just 'fess up to her parents one night, and told them. And she did finish out the school year teaching, before moving to be with Pappaw. They had 4 kids, 9 grandkids, numerous great-grandkids, and a very happy marriage, until Pappaw died a few years ago. Today would have been his 96th birthday. They are just awesome people!