A Marriage Find and a Tip When Searching Newspapers

After many years of looking, I have found the marriage date for my grandmother’s sister, Ethel Elizabeth Quigley’s marriage to John Vir Quigley.

I wasn’t looking at the time for her marriage, but instead was working on World War I draft cards. I made a spreadsheet with the names of all of the men in my database who were found in these draft cards. I double-checked these names against the images on my computer and sometimes I needed to return to Ancestry to see the actual images.

When looking at John Vir Quigley’s card, one of the hints that Ancestry showed was to the “Newspapers.com Marriage Index, 1800s-1999” database. 

His name was right so I clicked on it. It was a link to The Butte Miner newspaper in Montana about the marriage of Ethel Elizabeth Sullivan to John Vir Quigley in Burlingame, California, on 20 October 1925![1]

According to the article, Ethel, a former Anaconda girl and daughter of John H. Sullivan, was married to John V. Quigley of San Francisco at St. Catherine’s church in Burlingame. She used to work at the office of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company in the brick department. Vir had visited Anaconda many times while working for the Minerals Separation Company.[2]

The article gave wonderful information that convinced me I was looking at the correct couple. But, I wanted more about the wedding. Perhaps there was an article in the local Burlingame or San Mateo newspaper that might have the announcement of their marriage or a story about the wedding.

Searching for the name “Vir Quigley” turned up nothing, so I decided to browse. There were images of The Times, a newspaper in San Mateo, for October 1925 and I found two articles in the October 21 issue. Vir and Ethel were married in the morning of the day of his parent’s fiftieth anniversary.[3] They probably picked that day because Vir’s family were all together for the anniversary celebration.[4]

Ethel’s sister, Anna, was the matron of honor, and Vir’s brother, George, was the best man. Anna was the only one from her family there. Ethel wore a dress made of silk with a hat to match and carried gardenias. It’s a shame we have no photos of the event.

Their marriage was short-lived. She died during the pregnancy of their second child on 26 October 1927.[5] That was the reason their son, John, didn’t know the date of his parent’s wedding. He had only been a few months older than one years old and had no memory of his mother.

The Tip
There were several reasons the article didn’t come up in the search. First, the Quigley name in the wedding article was hyphenated. The algorithm does not catch hyphenated words well. Try searching only part of the name. Think about where a hyphen might be placed. The second reason was the image was poor quality with missing letters and the OCR probably had trouble making out all of the words. However, when we read our brains can often fill in the missing letters. There are still words I’m unsure of because there are not enough letters to help me make them out.

Another tip: read the other articles in the same issue. I have often found a second article about the same subject or found articles about other family members. On the same page as this article was the one about Vir's parent's fiftieth anniversary party.

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[1] “Married in California,” The Butte (Montana) Miner, 22 Oct 1925, p. 11.

[2] Ibid.

[3] “Marriage is Celebrated,” The (San Mateo) Times, 21 Oct 1925, p. 3.

[4] “Golden Wedding is Celebrated,” The (San Mateo) Times, 21 Oct 1925, p. 3.

[5] “Mrs. Quigley Dies in Butte Hospital,” The Anaconda (Montana) Standard, 28 Oct 1927, p. 9.

Copyright © 2020 by Lisa S. Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.