June 22, 2026
Introduction: In this article – the second in a four-part series – Katie Rebecca Merkley continues the story of Mary Drapoe’s astonishing eight marriages! Katie specializes in U.S. research for family history, enjoys writing and researching, and is developing curricula for teaching children genealogy. She has a website: krgarnergenealogy.com
In Part 1, we examined newspaper coverage of Mary J. Drapoe’s eight marriages, noting inconsistencies in the accounts. By evaluating the reliability of sources and checking other records, we can gauge the accuracy of the information. We will continue this four-part series by doing this and looking at other sources to verify the claims in the newspapers.
Photo credit: https://depositphotos.com/home.html
Correlating Research Data
In most of the newspaper articles, the informant (i.e., the source for the article’s information) was not mentioned, so it is impossible to determine the level of authority of the information provided. In a couple of the articles, one of the lawyers involved in one of Mary’s divorces was the informant. Lawyers would have disclosed what they understood of the situation, which may or may not have been accurate according to the parties involved.
In some of the articles, Mary herself was the informant. One newspaper indicated she’d been interviewed. Another newspaper article, shown below, was written by her.
In this article, Mary writes:
Seven husbands have taught me a great deal about the nature of man, and I am quite willing to hand on my information to the rest of my sex. It is the easiest thing in the world to get a husband if you only go about it in the right way.
I began my conquests at fourteen. Am now thirty-five and I am on my eighth – my eighth genuine conquest. He will step in when number seven steps out.
It is easy to assume that the article Mary wrote, or at least the ones she was interviewed in, are the most accurate – but that may not necessarily be the case. When Mary was the informant, she or the journalists relied on her memory. How accurately can a 35-year-old remember when they were 14? In one newspaper article, Mary admitted to having difficulty remembering how many of her past husbands were divorced and how many died. This could explain the discrepancies in the various numbers between all the newspaper accounts.
Memory is not the only factor here. How did Mary feel about being interviewed about her marriage history? The Philadelphia Inquirer article below, in describing how the journalists rushed to interview her on catching husbands, said she “was obliging. She gave her recipe unhesitatingly.”
This, along with the fact that she wrote an article, suggests she was willing to share information. But it is uncertain how honest she was in her willingness to share. Did Mary exaggerate a few details to make her stories more exciting? Or did she provide as honest answers as her memory would allow?
It is also important to note that fact-checking mattered less to journalists back then than it does now. Newspapers cared more about collecting and publishing sensational stories.
For this reason, genealogists do not rely on a single record type. We gather and correlate evidence from many types of records.
Research to Verify Newspaper Claims
Timelines can be a useful tool in genealogy research. It was certainly a good way to keep track of all of Mary’s husbands, helping me determine when to search for marriage, death, and divorce records. My folly was that I had done so based on only one newspaper article. The singular article allowed me to estimate some of the dates, but most of those were a few years off.
Checking other records helped fill in some of the details in her marriage timeline. For example:
Husband #1
Mary J. Drapoe and Edward B. Wakeman married in New York on 19 November 1882. (1) Subtracting 14 from this marriage year puts her birth year around 1868.
Husband #2
A death notice confirmed the death of Henry A. Saunders of New Haven, Connecticut. He died at age 28 on 10 July 1888. (2)
Husband #7
Thomas Crowther and Mary Lindley (her previous husband, #6, was James Lindley) married on 12 June 1901 in New York City. He was 55, and she was 34. (3) The record appeared as an index-only record on FamilySearch, but the image was available to view at a FamilySearch center. The image always has more information than the index. In this case, it revealed Mary’s middle name to be Jane – another important detail to add to her story.
Continuing Research
I have not yet finished finding all the vital records to verify Mary Jane’s serial monogamy. This is a lot to research; I have to not only find the marriage record for each husband, but also a divorce or death record, depending on how the marriage ended.
Usually, it’s tricky to research a widow who’s remarried, because you may not know her new surname. I’ve had numerous projects where both spouses dropped off the census records. When this happens, it’s either because both spouses died or because the husband died and the wife remarried.
For a female ancestor who remarried multiple times, you have multiple surnames to find out and work with. Mary’s appearance in the newspapers for marrying so many times means we know the names of her first eight husbands. She would be difficult to track, but fortunately the high number of her marriages made her newsworthy.
Besides locating the vital records of the known husbands, I’d like to determine whether Mary had additional husbands. Two more have been identified, bringing her marriage count up to ten. There may have been more…
One tried-and-true research strategy is cluster research, or FAN (family, associates, neighbors) research, which involves researching other people associated with your ancestor.
I used this method to identify one of Mary’s husbands. I searched GenealogyBank’s Census Records for Mary’s mother, Lucy Drapeau (Drapoe), and found her in the 1920 census living with her daughter Mary – and Mary’s husband, Clarence Smith. I found Mary’s mother in this record: Smith family, 1920 U.S. census, Derby, New Haven County, Connecticut, population schedule, E.D. 255, sheet no. 31A, house no. 80, Lucy Drapeau in household of Clarence Smith; digital image, GenealogyBank (https://genealogybank: accessed 12 May 2026).
Since Mary was such a big news item when divorcing her 7th husband and marrying her 8th, it seems possible that she would have made the news with more divorces and marriages. Therefore, newspapers will be consulted to identify more husbands.
If the only information we took from the newspapers was the vital information about Mary’s marriages, we could end this blog series here. But we’d be missing out on some very juicy information. If your ancestors were mentioned in the newspapers, it usually indicates that something in their lives caught journalists’ attention. It’s stories like these that flesh out our ancestors.
Keep your eye out for the next article in this series to learn about the drama that the newspapers captured about Mary’s divorces and marriages.
Stay tuned…
Create a free account at GenealogyBank for 7 days to start your journey and discover the stories your ancestors left behind.
Note on the header image: wedding cake and champagne glasses. Credit: https://depositphotos.com/home.html
_____________
(1) New York State Department of Health, Marriage Index, 1881-1967, marriage index entry for Edward B. Wakeman and Mary J. Drapoe, 19 November 1882, South East; certificate no. 7091.
(2) “Died,” entry for Henry A. Saunders, New Haven Evening Register, 11 July 1888, pg. 4, col. 5; imaged, GenealogyBank (https://genealogybank.com: accessed 20 August 2025).
(3) “New York, New York City Marriage Records, 1829-1938,” database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:24SJ-2SY?lang=en: accessed 7 April 2026), marriage index, Tom Crowther and Mary Lindley, 12 June 1901, Manhattan, New York City, New York, certificate no. 12052; citing New York City.
Related Article:
