Indiana divorce laws guide!

 Meredith Thompson in the December 2013 Indiana Genealogist: "When railroads began to connect Indiana with the rest of the country in the 1840s, the state developed a reputation as a 'divorce mill,' with people coming from outside the state to file for divorce. Indianapolis was an especially popular destination; in 1858 two-thirds of Marion County divorce cases were filed by out-of-state petitioners."

Want more? Do you need the lowdown on Indiana's divorce laws? Waste no time in scrounging the internet: join the Indiana Genealogical Society and read Thompson's thorough source-cited explanation as just the first of your member benefits. Do it now and get your money's worth, as all annual memberships expire at the end of the calendar year.





Meredith Thompson, "Indiana's Pre-1940 Divorce Laws," Indiana Genealogist 24(4):13-20, December 2013.

Harold Henderson, "Indiana divorce laws guide!," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 26 February 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Learning about divorce

Why genealogists need to read history, even decades-old history:

Between 1867 and 1929, the population of the United States increased 300 percent, the number of marriages 400 percent, and the divorce rate 2,000 percent. By the end of the 1920s, more than one marriage in six ended in divorce every year. ...

Contradicting the assumption that more divorce meant less interest in marriage, between 1900 and 1920 the proportion of the eligible population choosing to marry rose along with the divorce rate. Moreover, the marriage age declined for both sexes.

That's historian Elaine Tyler May in her 1980 book Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America. I wish I'd known this (plus what more she has to say that I haven't read yet) when I was writing about a Wisconsin relative who got divorced around 1908! BTW, the book is largely based on divorce court cases in Los Angeles, where many Midwesterners ended up.