Genealogy Happy Dance Time!
I’ve been searching for the marriage details of my 2nd Great-Grandparents, Samuel Estus Daniel (2 Jun 1891 – 13 Feb 1963) & Sarah Frances Elizabeth Scott (23 Jun 1895 – 15 May 1967) (my Grandmother’s namesake). For years I have been stumbling over a marriage index that reported a marriage between S E Daniel & S F Short. The year was about right (1910) based on census data and births. The location was correct (Clay County Tennessee). There were no other close candidates in the indexes I had reviewed.
My theory was Sarah Frances Elizabeth Scott must have married prior to Samuel Daniel. Being that she was born in 1895, her age was only 15 when she married Samuel; she would have been even younger at the time of a prior marriage. This was not impossible, but fairly unlikely by the early 1900′s. Still, the index had her listed as “Short”.
Along comes Ancestry.com to the rescue. Their recent introduction of Tennessee records, particularly “Tennessee State Marriages, 1780-2002“, made original documents available. While searching for “Daniel” marriages in “Clay County Tennessee”, I once again found the Daniel-Short marriage.
Upon examination of the scanned document, I finally got the answer to my quandary. The marriage license spelled the names correctly in the first section, S E Daniel & S F Scott. See below:
The second section of the marriage license contained a “clerical” error. In this case, the error was actually committed by the County “Clerk”!
Mystery solved. There seems to be no prior marriage for Sarah. This brings me back to something we all know and should remember. Always check the original sources. Indexes are helpful, but nothing beats the original source!
See the complete image: Click Here
Record Details
- Name: S E Daniel
- Spouse: S F Short [should be Scott]
- Marriage Date: 13 Mar 1910
- Marriage County: Clay
- Marriage State: Tennessee
Source Information:
Ancestry.com. Tennessee State Marriages, 1780-2002 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 2008. Original data: Tennessee State Marriages, 1780-2002. Nashville, TN, USA: Tennessee State Library and Archives. Microfilm.
