So, in going through my parents divorce document (61) while preparing for probate, it turns on they were both divorced and annulled in the same document on the same day. Any legal beagles explain that? The state (Texas) has a pretty strict definition of both and they don’t overlap. I think I have an idea, but it makes the divorce even sadder.
Were they, or one of them, Catholic, Orthodox, or COE? Could one of the documents be an acknowledgement from the church that no state of marriage ever existed?
They were lifelong Church of Christ.
Atheist and Believer get married twice: first time by a justice of the peace in a civil wedding at town hall; second time in a religious wedding at a church that does not recognize civil weddings.
Come divorce time: the religious wedding is found to not exist in civil law due to the parties already being married in a civil ceremony, so an annulment is issued; the civil wedding remains valid so it is terminated by way of a divorce.
We won’t go down the auto-bigamy path.
It may not have to do with believer/atheist or whatever marriage. But two ceremonies is probably the reason. The two ceremonies could have happened for a lot of reasons.
I had a great aunt who used to say that she was “divorced three time, because she was married three times-- to the same person,” although it certainly could be one was actually an annulment.
She was a WAAC who married while deployed, to an Englishman. They had a military wedding, because they needed to for his paperwork to travel as a military spouse back to the US (at least as she told it), then they had a wedding in England for his family. She was Jewish and he was COE. I assume it was a civil wedding, but it could have been COE, I really don’t know. He began conversion lessons as soon as they returned to the US, and about 18 months later, after his conversion, had a Jewish wedding.
When they divorced, he had to give her a get-- a “get” is a Jewish document that says that a Jewish marriage is no longer, and allows the parties to remarry-- although not to each other. The man presents it to the woman, and anyone who wants to know more on that point can PM me.
They also had to get a civil divorce in the US for the military marriage.
They were married long enough that he could have stayed in the US, but he chose to return to the UK. When he got there, he called her (international calls were pretty unusual then) to say that they needed to get a UK divorce, and he would be sending her paperwork. This is the one that may have been an annulment, because it was so simple.
Another reason I can think of, if the poster is from the US, is that the state where they were married may have been willing to annul the marriage, but the state where they lived may have necessitated a divorce. It’s not true anymore, but once upon a time, an annulment led to children of the marriage being considered illegitimate, and being illegitimate was a problem for people at a time in history.
A final possibility is that the OPs parents renewed their vows at some point. This is not actually a binding ceremony on already-married couples, it’s just a formality, but when a couple who has done this gets divorced, to be on the safe side, if the renewal was officiated by someone with the power to marry, a lawyer involved in the divorce may have played it safe, and had the renewal annulled.
I just thought of something else-- the marriage may have been annulled because the couple qualified for an annulment for whatever reason, and so they chose to do that rather than divorce, but because they were married long enough to set up a household and produce children, they may have need to go in front of a judge for “divorce proceeding” in order to split up property and decide child custody.
Is it possible that one or both were underaged? And therefore could not consent to marriage and so there was never any marriage legally, in the first place.