Izola Martha Mills marriage certificate/note to Mr. Hall

[Steve Whitlock]

(10-17-2019 04:02 AM)Steve Wrote:  I have a copy of the 1869 Baltimore marriage record. My guess is the marriage, or marriage record, might have been for Rosalie Booth's sake by using the surname "Booth" to bolster Martha's claim about Booth being the father of two of her children. The 1871 Boston marriage record was created to prevent a fraud investigation by the pension examiners. If the examiners had looked more closely at the application they would've figured out that it was impossible for Bellows Sr. to have been the father of Ogarita, since he was at sea during Martha's entire pregnancy.

I also have the marriage records, as well as the 1871 birth of Harry Jerome Dresback Stevenson, which is sometimes claimed to have occurred in 1870 in order to go along with the myth of Martha running off to be with JWB and coming back pregnant in 1869.

I'm unsure as to exactly how long Charles S. Bellows Sr was away at sea, and whether a short term child could have been claimed. However, even in the case of a Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith and his vasectomy supporting his divorce against his wife for adultery the presumption was that when a couple is married any children that come along are the husband's. That's why Timothy Lincoln Beckwith got a million dollar settlement from RTL Beckwith's estate, rather than test his paternity, again, in court. And that was after a judge had already ruled against his mother for refusing dna testing.

Perhaps the feeling was the same for the probate and pension of Seaman Charles Still Bellows; however, had they known that she was a bigamist the results might have been different, and yet, would the children have still had a claim, having been born while Martha and Charles were still married. Why didn't he divorce her if not his children?

Do we know exactly when Martha and Rosalie got chummy? I noticed that in the hearings, and on her birth certificate, Ogarita was Ogarita Elizabeth Bellows, but later was Ogarita Elizabeth Rosalie Booth/Bellows.