I just got one of those emails from FamilySearch offering to help me commemorate my great-grandmother’s anniversary, so I decided to write a quick blog post about her.
Clicking the link in the email shows me a calendar with January events from my tree. Card-like windows tell me more about Mary Trewren–she was married at 22 in 1894, she lived to be 77. From the card, I can view any Memories attached to Mary (there aren’t any). I can also view a diagram of my relationship to her, share the news about her anniversary on social media, or go to her person page in the FamilySearch tree.
One of the sources attached to Mary is her marriage license application from “Pennsylvania, County Marriages, 1885–1950” on FamilySearch. [1.”Pennsylvania, County Marriages, 1885-1950″, ,FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:KMC5-QZ6 : Sun Oct 15 16:52:35 UTC 2023), entry for Edward E. Weaver and Mary Trewren, 24 Jan 1894.] The application gives the names, birthdates, and birthplaces of Mary and her husband-to-be, along with their occupations. The marriage license was issued 24 January 1894, and the duplicate certificate was returned 31 January by A.D. Geist.
Another source about this marriage, this one available on Ancestry in the “Pennsylvania, Church and Town Records, 1708–1985” collection, reveals a surprise: the couple was married not in Summit Hill, where the bride’s family resided, or in Tamaqua, where the groom’s family resided, but in Port Carbon, where neither family resided or had known ties. The wedding was performed in the parsonage of the First United Methodist Church by A.D. Geist, the clergyman who signed the duplicate certificate, 25 January 1894. [2. “Pennsylvania and New Jersey U.S., Church and Town Records, 1669–2013,” Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/2451/ : accessed 26 January 2024), PA-Schuylkill > Port Carbon > Methodist > First United Methodist Church > image 219 of 239, entry for Edward E. Weaver and Mary Trewren.]
I believe that this photo, from the collection of my late mother, is likely the wedding photo of Mary Trewren and Edward Elwood Weaver.
Ironically, my mother, who grew up in her grandparents’ house, did not recognize the people in the photo. (She thought they were members of the Trewren family.) My identification is based on comparison with other photos of Mary and Edward taken later in their lives, plus dating of their clothing using Maureen A. Taylor’s Uncovering Your Ancestry Through Family Photographs. [3. I used Maureen A. Taylor, Uncovering Your Ancestry Through Family Photographs, 2nd ed. (Cincinnati: Family Tree Books, 2005), 85–96.] Until the 1980s or 1990s Mom had the bodice of her grandmother’s wedding dress, which she described as brown taffeta.
