Not my family, but when I was in Mexico working on a project, one of the lab techs took a day off to go to his grandparents’ wedding. Now, this is Mexico: it’s not unusual for a man to have more than one family, so people asked if this was the case. No, the bride was, as far as they knew, the groom’s only girlfriend; they had half a dozen kids, two dozen grandkids and had been together for more than 40 years. But they had never lived together or bothered getting married until the great-grandchildren had started asking “why are Gramma and Granpa not married?”
One of my great-grandmothers was a young lady of good breeding from Bilbao. At 17 she got this suitor, a medical student who was also from Bilbao and also descended from one of the men that founded the place (Bilbao is a newborn by Spanish standards, being only 700 years old), but for some reason he was considered unsuitable by her mother. They met again some 12 years later and the old spark didn’t so much get rekindled as discover it had never gone off, so they married despite her family’s threats to disown her - which they did.
He died just a few years later, one of the earliest victims of an epidemic, leaving her with a toddler (my future paternal grandmother) and a newborn. They were taken in by some distant relatives; I’ve met some of their descendants at different times (both my lastname and theirs are rare enough to identify each other easily).
My paternal grandfather’s family all volunteered with the rebel side in the 1936-9 Spanish Civil War. The sisters were originally sent to be nurses, but one of them was such a sargeant that they reassigned her to a warehouse where she’d work under her father, thinking “if he can’t rein her in, nobody can.” She did eventually make sergeant. She also did fall in love with one of the first local policemen to ride motorbikes, and a dashing figure he cut accourding to all. Now, the man was “a gambler, but not too much; a drinker, in moderation; handsome yet not conceited, and his foreparents were known for a long time”; he was employed and doing well; in other words, he was everything a man should be according to the wisdom of the time and place. But alas, the sergeant was her mother’s daughter, and they locked horns over the suitor, which the mother did again not find suitable (note that in neither case do we have a record of the father’s opinion), so they eloped. Eventually they moved to Venezuela; one day when I was living in Miami I called home and was told that one of my second-cousins had established contact with my grandmother and it turns out this cousin’s parents (that is, my father’s cousin and her husband) were living in Miami, 25’ away from my own house. I spent Thanksgiving with them, discovered that a second-cousin of mine had gotten kicked out of the Marines on grounds of Stupidity (1) and convinced her mother to let him become a mechanic like he wanted instead of insisting that he had to be a lawyer. I have no idea why I seem to keep having conversations like that one with people, from relatives I’m meeting for the second time to people whose kids I used to babysit.
1: he hurt his ankle in the obstacle run, didn’t go to the infirmary because We Be Mucho Macho, a couple days later he landed wrong again but one of the DIs saw it and, upon seeing the color and amount of swelling, realized that foot had already been in bad shape. So he got a medical on grounds of Being Too Stupid To Know When To Ask For A Medic.
