I’m thinking along the lines of older spouse dies, younger spouse marries someone younger and becomes the older spouse. Then older spouse dies again and repeat. Has anything like this happened in a long enough chain to be significant? Is it so mundane no one cares?
Not at all an answer to your question, but a very semi-related tangent.
The last receipt of a US Civil War pension passed away relatively recently. She was a young woman who would regularly help out a local older man, a civil war vet with no kids or family otherwise. Towards the end of his days, he married her so she'd get the benefits of his pension, as things were really really tough.
Some of the detail might be off, going off of memory, but that's the general gist.
EDIT:
So I went to double check, and I got a fair bit of it wrong.
Irene Triplett
She was actually the daughter of the woman I thought I was talking about. Her mother married her father at ages 29 and 78 respectively, and she was born one of five children in 1930, living until the age of 90 before passing in 2020.
Let's say he was 18 at the end of the war on 1865. That was 159 years ago. They have to split that time between his remaining lifetime and all of hers after she's old enough to marry. It's possible they both lived to nearly 100.
Less plausible is that his pension would go to a spouse he married after he retired from the service. Anyone know anything about that in modern times?
So I went to double check, and I got a fair bit of it wrong.
Irene Triplett
She was actually the daughter of the woman I thought I was talking about. Her mother married her father at ages 29 and 78 respectively, and she was born one of five children in 1930, living until the age of 90 before passing in 2020.
That’s a really interesting question, but I’m having a hard time seeing how one can look this up without direct access to an SQL database of all married people. Can we pay off some government sysadmin?
The data is mostly already there and publicly maintained. Ancestry/familysearch/etc should get us something interesting at least, data is a little bit light outside the us but someone would just need to go through it.
This sounds like a job for a weird spaghetti code contraption consisting of selenium, perl, DBI, postgres, and shitloads of caffeine. I’ll give it a look tomorrow, hoping that the captcha I assume is there can be circumvented or automated one way or another.
I’m not really interested in the people, as I’m not from the US and am unlikely to be related to any of them. I’m just curious about the dataset itself, especially in relation to OPs question.
And yes, I wrote perl and not something newer. Suck my camel hump, it’s how I roll.
Honestly it would be kind of fun to hear those statistics. “This is the first time in 10 years SkipWapPallyPap has remembered an important before the date”.
Nah just in general. I mean it would work even if they get married the day before they pass away as long as their spouse gets married again and continues the cycle.
IMO, rather personal, and not statistically valuable information. Someone would need to scour endless records from different sources combining the info together and at best, they’d end up with a Guinness world record entry of some sort. Depending on the quality and age of records too you’re likely going to run into issues distinguishing people of the same name somewhere along the line.
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