My grandparents’ Elkton Marriage License (click to view full size)

On July 24, 1937, my grandparents Orville W. Garrison & Naomi E. Carman were married in Elkton, Maryland. My grandmother told me this, but unfortunately I did not know enough about Elkton to ask for more of the story. It turns out that Elkton was known as the place Philadelphians went to when they eloped or otherwise wanted a quick marriage. Unlike neighboring states, Maryland did not have a waiting period for marriage at the time.

The Boundary Stones blog has a brief overview of Elkton as the place for quickie marriages. According to that article “couples didn’t have to wait to use their marriage license in Maryland, but they did have to have a church service as part of the ceremony,” which might explain why my (as far as I know) irreligious grandparents were married by a Baptist minister. (My grandfather’s family were mostly Methodists. My grandmother’s were a mish-mash of various Protestant denominations, none of which were Baptist, and Catholics.)

I do know that my grandparents had waited to get married because they had both been out of work due to the Depression. So, perhaps after they got jobs, they just couldn’t wait? I do know it was not a “shotgun wedding,” as my mother was born a little less than a year later. It was also not due to the rashness of youth as described in the blog article above. My grandmother was 32 and my grandfather was 29, both had worked since adolescence and my grandfather had already been out west and returned, so they were not young people “first experiencing freedom.” I will probably never know why my grandparents ran off to Elkton to get married instead of waiting 48 hours to get married in Philadelphia, but it’s interesting to know they were a part of east coast history.

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Sources:

Maryland. Cecil County. Marriage Certificates. Clerk of the Circuit Court, Elkton. Orville W. Garrison & Naomi E. Carman, 1937.

“Elkton, Maryland: The Quickie Wedding Capital of the East Coast,” by Krystle Kline. Boundary Stones: WETA’s Local History Blog, https://blogs.weta.org/boundarystones/.

Hillcrest Memorial Park
Hurffville, New Jersey

Photograph by Find-A-Grave user James Mason Fritz

Garrisons Gravestone.
Click to view Orville W. Garrison memorial on Find-A-Grave.com.

GARRISON

Orville W.
1907 – 1968
[Freemason symbol between years]

Naomi E.
1905 – 1999
[Order of Eastern Star symbol between years]

Original Source Citation:
Find A Grave, Find A Grave, database and images (http://findagrave.com : accessed 9 November 2013), Orville W. Garrison, Memorial # 16195964.

Kaighn Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church Baptisms, 1911-12.
Camden, New Jersey

Orville Wilson Garrison, baptism. Click to see full page.

Orville Wilson Garrison, Infant

Date of Birth: Sept 20, 1907

Residence: 919 S. Fifth

Date of Baptism: June 9, 1912

[The sponsors, method, minister, place and notes seem all to be blank for him. Orville is below the last line on the left side of the page and that space is blank on the right.]

Original Source Citation:
Historical Society of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), Kaighn Avenue Methodist Episcopal, Camden, NJ, Orville Wilson Garrison; digital images, Ancestry.com. Pennsylvania, Historic Church and Town Records, 1708-1985 (http://search.ancestry.com/search/db.aspx?dbid=2451 : accessed 13 September 2012)

Bride & groom with their parents.

October 24, 1959, Pitman, NJ (from left to right: Orville & Naomi Garrison, Carol & Charles Conrad, Susan & Edward Conrad)

When I sent away for my grandfather’s railroad retirement files I did not know what to expect. One surprise that provided a neat bit of new information were copies of his Social Security applications (SS-5).

There were two of them: the original one from 1936 and a second one in 1953. It took me awhile to figure out why there was a second SS-5 form:

Orville W. Garrison 1953 SS-5. Click to see full size.

 Then, I read lines 1 and 2 more closely:

The second application was filed to correct a misinterpretation of handwriting in the original 1936 application. Apparently someone’s v’s looked too much like r’s:

The v is more apparent in his signature on that application:

The neat new bit of information was my great-grandfather’s middle name. I now know his full name was John Samuel Garrison.

Orville W. Garrison’s 1936 SS-5. Click to see full size.