How Much Conflict Was There? – 52 Ancestors, # 42

I wrote about my “black sheep” ancestor, John Salt in # 26.  Briefly, the story is that he had dallied with one young woman promising marriage and then married another (in 1809).  There are papers from court showing that he publicly apologized to the spurned young woman, and affirmed her being a fine and virtuous young woman.  She, in turn, accepted his statement and let it go.

There are two points that occur to me here as possible indications of conflict.  The first is that although in Kentucky at that time a marriage bond was required, I have not found one for John Salt and Nancy Wiley (the young woman in question).  (In fact I have had no luck finding her family connection, which a bond might have pointed to.)  This lack of marriage bond might underline John’s lack of intention to marry her and there might well have been conflict between the two over his not having applied for a bond.  The second indication of conflict is the question of how or why John was in court making his statement of apology.  It seems likely that the spurned young woman insisted on satisfaction one way or the other, and if he wouldn’t (couldn’t in fact) marry her then she wanted a public apology on record and so made him go to court.

As I noted in my first post about this situation, John couldn’t marry Nancy Wiley by the time he was presenting his apology in court, since he had already married another Nancy – Nancy Donovan – in November of the previous year.  There is a marriage bond for this intention and I now have a copy (thanks, cousin Virginia!).  The bond indicates that on November 25, 1809 John had the intention of marrying Nancy Donovan and gave bond that he would.  So-o-o, between then and January 1810 John had a wife who might well have wanted him to disentangle himself from this “other woman”.  There is no family tale and there are no pieces of evidence that I know of that Nancy Donovan (or her family) were in conflict with John about this, but it seems very possible.  While there is the possibility that John’s behavior prior to his marriage was not particularly outside social norms in some ways, the timing of the required apology suggests that Nancy Wiley had not just gone away when his marriage to another had become a fact.