Love and marriage

True Love or what?  I  remember saying to a friend, that's the man I'm going to marry.
Turned out not to be true however...I think he had other ideas.

Thanks to Garrison Keilor's Writer's Almanac, I am copying this poem from a few days ago.

Love at First Sight
by Jennifer Maier

You always hear about it—
a waitress serves a man two eggs
over easy and she says to the cashier,
That is the man I’m going to marry,
and she does. Or a man spies a woman
at a baseball game; she is blond
and wearing a blue headband,
and, being a man, he doesn’t say this
or even think it, but his heart is a homing bird
winging to her perch, and next thing you know
they’re building birdhouses in the garage.
How do they know, these auspicious lovers?
They are like passengers on a yellow
bus painted with the dreams
of innumerable lifetimes, a packet
of sepia postcards in their pocket.
And who’s to say they haven’t traveled
backward for centuries through borderless
lands, only to arrive at this roadside attraction
where Chance meets Necessity and says,
What time do you get off?

"Love at First Sight" by Jennifer Maier from Dark Alphabet. © Southern Illinois University Press, 2006.


Did you ever think that that was your true love when you first saw or met him/her?
I may have missed out on that one man, but I think I did make a good decision about the one I finally did marry.  Unfortunately that didn't mean I could live with him.  And apparently that happened several times in my life.

Big congrats to those who persevere through years and years of marriage!

But falling in love is something completely different, I think.

Saturday this week

The records of marriages registered in Boston, in the year 1793.

I kept this record of the marriage of Betsey Dwelle and Ebenezer Pulsipher, on May 11 1793. It is alphabetized for the year, but I wonder about the date. Beautiful penmanship is also noteworthy and much appreciated!

Now I scratch my head, to remember the meaning of the record.  My grandmother was a descendant of the Pulsifers (Pulsiphers) of Massachusetts.  So let's go over to Ancestry and see how she connected to this early couple.

Their daughter Lucy Pulsifer, married George T. Granger, who during the Civil War wrote letters and helped save their orphaned granddaughters in Texas.  One of those granddaughters was my paternal great-grandmother.

I'm amazed at all the records that Betsey and Ebenezer Pulsipher (Pulsifer) managed to have in their short lives! They may have gotten married on another day, or perhaps the registration date wasn't the same as the wedding date.



This record shows on fourth entry that the couple were married in February of 1794, in Boston. It may also have been the place where legal records were kept, since they spent all their lives in Newburyport, Essex County, MA.

They had 5 children. I don't know for sure what Ebenezer Pulsifer did for a living, but Newburyport, MA was a ship building and sailing town.  And when he died, he was listed in the Columbia Centenal (published Nov 21, 1827) newspaper as "Captain Ebenezer Pulsifer" age 54.  The Essex County records (below) state Captain Ebenezer Pulsifer died Nov. 7, 1826.

Old Hill Burying Ground, Newburyport, MA

Entrance to Old Hill Burying Ground, Newburyport, MA

Here is my submission to link to Sepia Saturday's meme of old photos...a topic on "Love and Marriage" for August.   I don't know how many posts I will have on topic, but this is a forgiving bunch! Go on over and see what other romantic fools have come up with!