Mail Order Bride in Texas

[dhsurles]

While I was researching one of my wife's relatives on Ancestry.com, I discovered that he had been married before he married the woman he had children with. I was searching his name on The Portal to Texas History and found something quite unexpected. William Calvin Townsley married Emma Wressell Ross in Lampasas in 1913. These news articles tell the "rest of the story." She was a mail-order-bride. (#1 article - 4 July 1913 edition of The Lampasas Daily Leader. #2 article - 18 July 1913 edition of The Democrat-Voice in Coleman) Can you imagine what that must have been like for her? There was no happy ending, however. She was still with Calvin when he registered for the draft in 1918, but by the time the census was taken in 1920, she was back with her parents in New York. Calvin married another Emma in Goldthwaite in 1921 and they had two children. Calvin died in Bangs (Brown County) in 1959 and his second Emma died in Brownwood in 1967. The first Emma married twice more and had one child. She died in Bellaire, Ohio in 1956.