‘Law’s Cruel Hand Takes the Bride’: an incident in Hoboken, 1893
I’ve been reading a lot of old US newspapers online in the course of my research recently. They are fascinating: I particularly love the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America site, which has a wide range of digitized newspapers dating from 1836 to 1922 in searchable, downloadable PDF form, free. I’ve found tons of useful things there, as well as at GenealogyBank (a paid site) and in the New York Times archive (mixture of free and paid).
I keep spotting all kinds of interesting stuff in passing. This New York Herald article from 8 March 1893 came up as a false positive on a search I was doing for Hoboken, NJ weddings in that year. I am easily distracted, so I ended up reading the whole thing and then searching for more information, even though the people concerned were in no way connected to my family. I was completely drawn in by the poetically embellished story of brave, stoical Agnes with her rosy cheeks, her manly young fruit-growing suitor, and her firm Scottish father in thrall to Agnes’s wicked young stepmother. Read more
