16 December 2009

Happy Anniversary a Day Early


My Grandpa and Grandma Neill were married on 17 December 1935--74 years ago tomorrow. Grandma never gave me a straight answer as to why they went to Keithsburg, Illinois, to get married. At the time they were married, Grandma lived with her mother and brother (Uncle Pete) in Loraine and Grandpa was living with his parents near Stillwell. It was a little bit of a drive in an unheated automobile on what probably was a cold Illinois winter day. To top it off, Keithsburg was not the county seat and they would have had to go to Aledo just to get the license.

It's hard to imagine Grandma with blond hair--she was always gray from my memory. Grandma always said that after the wedding Uncle Ralph chivareed them...I'm not certain if that's exactly what the wedding dinner refers to or not.

This announcement comes from the Mendon [Illinois] Post-Dispatch, December of 1935, but unfortunately I didn't include the exact date of the paper on the scan. I'm not even going to count the number of typographical errors in this clipping.