Have you even looked at census records and been perplexed by a person who shows up ten years later living across the country with completely different people? It can't be the same person, right?
Such a drastic change would lend improbability that this could still be your person, but an article on JStor suggests such a scenario was more likely than we might imagine. In "Lots of Them Did That: Desertion, Bigamy, and Marital Fluidity in Late-Nineteenth-Century America", Beverly Schwartzberg writes that in examining pension applications from the Civil War Pension Bureau she found a pattern that "demonstrates the significant degree to which marriage among the working class was a fluid practice during the late nineteenth century". In other words, it could very well be your great-great grandfather in Colorado, Oregon, then Texas, each time living with a different family.
The combination of accessible means of transportation and growing cities and communities meant that deserting your spouse or remarrying without the bother of divorce was easier to pull off and less likely to be found out. Schwartzberg uncovered that the number of marriage-like unions revealed in a single pension case went as high as twelve marriages between all the partners, where the family tree looked like a "tangled kudzu vine more than an oak".
Besides untangling complicated marriage histories, pension records also give us detailed information on women's participation in the labor force that were "generally hidden in the federal census, city directories, and other records". Under the 1890 pension act widows could only receive pensions if they showed financial need and supported themselves by their own labor, thus we can find details of their working life in their individual depositions.
If you'd like to read the article in its entirety, click here.
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