Moses Dane 52 Ancestors Week 7 Prompt: Love

Moses Dane: 1815-1893 

Second Chance at Love

My third great-uncle, Moses Dane, had a scandalous second chance at love late in life. Moses was born in Vermont in 1815 to David and Sally Randall Dane. The family moved to New York when he was two. Moses met and married Harriet Thomas Dane in Genesee around 1840.

Moses and Harriet moved their young family first to Wisconsin in the mid-1840s, and then to Minnesota. They moved back and forth between the two states a couple of times during the Civil War era. Both Moses and his eldest son David served in the Civil War. Only Moses returned home; David died of disease in an infantry camp in Tennessee.

Moses’ second son, William, married Mary Loraine Stoddard in Wisconsin on November 25, 1866. They had one son, Alan Eloxious Dane, three years later. William died on October 12, 1876 at the young age of thirty, leaving his 28 year old widow and young son in the care of his father and mother, Moses and Harriet.

Harriet died October 17, 1884 at age 67. Moses was nearly 69. Now his household held only his daughter-in-law and his grandson.

Apparently, these two lonely people fell in love. On New Year’s Eve 1885, Moses’ brother, Jerome, rode over to Moses’ Medo, Minnesota home from Jerome’s home near Mankato. Jerome was a jack of all trades, serving variously as a military officer, farmer, postmaster and also, surprisingly, an ordained minister. His ordination was apparently legal enough that he was able to join 70-year-old Moses in marriage to Moses’ 37-year-old daughter-in-law Loraine, who thus became a Dane twice over.

This scandalous occurrence made the local newspaper. It is hard to tell if the in-law relationship or the age difference was more shocking to the readers. 

The happy couple welcomed a son, Charles Stoddard Dane, on October 9, 1888. The proud father was 73 years old at the time! Loraine’s older son Allen (Moses’ grandson) had married and moved out just a month earlier. Less than a year later, Allen had a son of his own, William, named after Allen’s father. Charles would have been little William’s uncle, even though they were only ten months apart in age.

Moses died just shy of his son’s fifth birthday on October 19, 1893. The twice-widowed Loraine remarried four years later and moved to Portland, Oregon with her new husband Aaron Lewis, taking Charles Stoddard Dane with her. She lived until 1927. Charles never married, working as a farm laborer in the Ione, Oregon area. He died at age 67.