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Archiver > TMG > 2000-04 > 0956506303


From: "Neil S. Smith" <>
Subject: [TMG] Re: TMG-L: married names
Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2000 11:11:43 -0500
References: <003801bfabb7$de482c60$67815b0a@ychs03>


Looks like my original statement applies about different parts of the
country having different laws and customs is correct. In my research of
property records in Missouri, even in the early days circa 1820, the woman's
right of dower was upheld. When a married couple (I've never seen an
unmarried couple listed) sold property, the county clerk always recorded
that he took the wife aside and verified that she was acting without
compulsion by her husband in the sale of the property, 1/3 of which was hers
by law. I had read that the right of dower was English in origin and fairly
well the standard in the US. Must not be completely true.

Neil Smith
Columbia, MO
----- Original Message -----
From: "Fran Dumas" <>
To: <>
Sent: Friday, April 21, 2000 8:06 AM
Subject: RE: TMG-L: married names


> I think married women tended to use their birth names throughout life if
> they emigrated from the Continent of Europe rather than England; I have
done
> Acadian and French Canadian research, where it is extremely easy to fill
out
> a pedigree chart with all the names you care to look up (women included)
but
> the hard part is finding out anything else about the people in question. I
> have also done Dutch families in New York and Palatine Germans in the
Hudson
> Valley, and the church records for both are wonderful, as they give the
> birth names of the women in the family. When the same women appear on
public
> records, though, they had to use their husband's surname, since the civil
> law was English. Married women could not own property in New York until
the
> Married Women's Property Act was passed in 1855; prior to that, all the
way
> back to the English takeover from the Dutch in the 17th century, as far as
> the government was concerned a married woman did not exist apart from her
> husband.
>
> Fran Dumas
> Yates County (NY) Historian
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [mailto:]On Behalf Of
> John MayBee
> Sent: Thursday, April 20, 2000 2:00 PM
> To:
> Subject: Re: TMG-L: married names
>
>
> "Neil S. Smith" wrote:
>
> > I guess we must have researched our US ancestors in different parts of
the
> country.
> > I've never found a single instance of my ancestors where the wife was
> identified as
> > anything other than her married name, not one. I've seen a lot of other
> people in
> > my search of county records and I've never seen one instance of a
husband
> and wife
> > having different surnames.


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