Sunday, January 14, 2018

Found it! - Maggie & Jacob Helfrich Marriage

Thanks to a fellow member of GAA, I was able to finally locate the Marriage record for Maggie and Jacob Helfrich. I have been looking for this record since I first began doing genealogy research in 2012. It all started with the Family Record book that I received from my grandma. That has been my only source of information for Maggie and Jacob, until now.

Here is the page mentioning Maggie and Jacob. As you can see it says Maggie "...came to St. Louis Oct 19, 1890 married Jacob Helfrich..." So I assumed she met and married Jacob in St. Louis based on this information. I have had great success finding marriage records for my family in St. Louis. I've only had one or two difficult searches, but usually the record was eventually found. Not in this case. It has frustrated me for years.



So I posted in my GAA group, asking for help with researching. I was mainly asking for help in locating Maggie's mom. I figured another set of eyes would help. So Sharon posted a couple of articles she found. I'm glad she found both of the articles because I wouldn't have believed the second article. In the first article, it states Mary M. Dennis is suing Logan Dennis for a divorce. Mary is Maggie's middle name. Then in the second article, only two months later, states Jacob Helfrich acquired a marriage license to wed Mary M. Dennis.




This totally blows my mind! Now I know why I couldn't find a marriage record for them in St. Louis. And this also answers the question why she came to St. Louis since she didn't have any family here. Jacob was from St. Louis and his family was already here. Plus this also gives me information about Maggie's divorce from her first husband. Well at least with this information I was able to track down the marriage record in Tennessee. 





I am beyond ecstatic right now. Proof of something is always a good thing. Of course I am far from done researching Maggie. This is just one more chapter I can close.