It was the later. The veteran was quite old and the bride very young. 17-year-old Helen Jackson married 93-year-old James Brolin in 1936. She died in Dec. 2020. It was Missouri. 😈
If you mean someone who was widowed by the war, i.e. married to a casualty, then that window is well past. If we mean someone who is the widow of an ACW veteran, provided a centenarian war survivor married a young girl who goes on to die a centenarian, it’s unlikely but possible.
Whimsical line “There must be some still living who have spoken with persons who saw Napoleon Bonaparte”. This was written in 1942 of course, but it got me thinking. As a young Army Cadet I fell in on my first Remembrance parade. There were two guards of veterans, No1 from the First World War, No2 the Second and later. In a wheelchair was a man who ahead of “Pip, Squeak and Wilfred” wore his Queen and King’s South Africa medals. Being only a boy, it took a while for the penny to drop that my Robin Hood Rifles cap badge bore the battle honour “South Africa 1900-1902” and I was looking a Robin Hood who knew Albert Ball VC as a young officer.
Those conflicts are only a little closer to us than our period than our period was for this writer. Makes you think about the long shadow cast by war.
It was the later. The veteran was quite old and the bride very young. 17-year-old Helen Jackson married 93-year-old James Brolin in 1936. She died in Dec. 2020. It was Missouri. 😈
If you mean someone who was widowed by the war, i.e. married to a casualty, then that window is well past. If we mean someone who is the widow of an ACW veteran, provided a centenarian war survivor married a young girl who goes on to die a centenarian, it’s unlikely but possible.
I saw a story recently that an ACW widow passed away, supposedly the last (though I've seen "last Civil War widow" stories before).
Whimsical line “There must be some still living who have spoken with persons who saw Napoleon Bonaparte”. This was written in 1942 of course, but it got me thinking. As a young Army Cadet I fell in on my first Remembrance parade. There were two guards of veterans, No1 from the First World War, No2 the Second and later. In a wheelchair was a man who ahead of “Pip, Squeak and Wilfred” wore his Queen and King’s South Africa medals. Being only a boy, it took a while for the penny to drop that my Robin Hood Rifles cap badge bore the battle honour “South Africa 1900-1902” and I was looking a Robin Hood who knew Albert Ball VC as a young officer. Those conflicts are only a little closer to us than our period than our period was for this writer. Makes you think about the long shadow cast by war.