How I Met Your Mother

 Now that the Laura Jane Harvey Murder series has drawn to it's conclusion, in it's place, for a few Fridays or so, I will post some stories about my great grandparents, the ones I knew the longest and the best, from the 100's of newspaper articles I found about them a couple months back. This one explains some mysteries now solved and others will be copies of letters written home by Victor during his time in France during World War I along with some selected photographs he took with his camera.

Victor and Grace Smith Kuck

I have always wondered how my great grandparents met. Unlike all my other ancestors, growing up in the same proximity wasn't involved. My great grandfather grew up and lived in Rockford and my great grandmother grew up and lived near Grand Mound. The were separated by 180 miles of cornfields, streams and hills. But yet my great grandfather stopped going to college, served in World War I and returned only to get married in less than a month after he returned home. I thought I might never know the answer to that question but recently discovering digitized newspaper in both their hometowns, I suspect I know how their paths crossed.

1 Mar 1917 - The Rockford Register

I came across this brief splurb in the digitized newspaper indicating that my great grandfather new my great grandmother before he left for the war and due to the wording, it probably was already a serious relationship at that point. It still didn't answer my question of how they came to meet but it did explain why they were married within a month of his return from France.

12 Jul 1917 - The Rockford Register

I next found this article from a few months later that provided the answer, or at least the proximity part of the answer. Clay Smith was the older brother to Grace Smith and evidently lived in Rockford for a time. I didn't know this because U.S. census records are done every ten years and in 1910 and 1920, they show him living at home or on a farm near the family farm near Grand Mound. Doing a search of my great grandmother's name, I found many news items of her visits to see her brother going back as far as 1913. The visits often lasted a week or two at a time due to the distances involved and Rockford is a very small town so it doesn't require a stretch of the imagination that they most likely met during one of these brother visits. How specifically, I'll never know.

25 Jul 2018 - The Rockford Register

The dating must have been going well because by the time my great grandfather was overseas in France, she was visiting her future in-laws for a week at a time. I would guess that my great grandfather proposed to her before he shipped overseas as it would seem a bit forward for a girlfriend to visit a boyfriend's parents for a week while he wasn't there. At any rate, my great grandfather returned and they indeed got married a month later as attested by the article below. Coincidentally, the article below is one of those clippings from my great great grandmother's memory book with no source information and the search for that source information sent me down this rabbit hole to start with. I was able to find the newspaper issue that it had been printed within.

25 Jul 1919 - The Rockford Register