Multiple Sisters Marry Same Man: 52 Ancestors 2021 Prompt "Multiple"

 Multiple Sisters, Multiple Marriages:

Charles Foster Slayton: 1854-1919

Mary Douglass 1859-1881

Clarissa "Clara" Douglass 1847-1919

Jennie Douglass 1869-1942

I am not directly related to Charles Foster Slayton, but he serially married three of my distant cousins, all sisters. Multiple sisters, multiple wives, multiple disasters. The mind boggles.

Charles Foster Slayton was born in 1854 to Edson Slayton in the Stowe, Vermont area. When he was 20 years old, he married 15-year-old Mary Douglass, my second cousin three times removed. The poor hapless Mary had three children before she turned 21 in 1881. A year later she was dead, leaving Charles a 27 year old widower with two children under six years of age--one child had died of spinal meningitis.

He turned to his sister-in-law for help and comfort. Mary had a sister who was twelve years her senior named Clarissa or Clara Douglass. She’d moved away when Mary was very young, first working as a servant and then marrying an older farmer named Othniel Darling. It’s unclear if Mr. Darling had died in the earlier 1880s, or if Clara had divorced him, but by 1883, she had married Charles Slayton, despite being seven years older than him.

Clara Douglass Slayton

The marriage didn’t last, however. By 1899, the 52-year-old Clara had divorced Charles and married a 57-year-old farmer named Jackson Sargent. This, her third marriage, lasted for the remainder of her life. She had no children with any of her husbands.

Charles played a little fast-and-loose on the 1900 census. He told the census taker he was married, and had been for 24 years (the length of time since the date of his first marriage, but hardly a continuous period of marriage). The census also showed that he had another sister-in-law, the divorced or widowed Jennie Douglass Bundy, living in his home with her three children, acting as his housekeeper. Apparently they got a little closer than employer/employee, for within a year, they were married.  Jennie was even younger than Mary. On August 10, 1901, the date of their marriage, she was 33, and Charles was 47.

Charles and Jennie had one child together, Charles Stanley Slayton, born in 1907. However, the marriage unraveled shortly afterward. By the 1910 census, the divorced Jennie was working as a housekeeper in Stowe. Charles and 3-year-old Stanley were living on his farm. He told the census-taker that he was a widower, even though he had his 20-year-old stepdaughter Julia, his ex-wife’s child by her previous husband, Mr. Bundy, working as his housekeeper, along with her much older husband John Frank Burnham, and their infant daughter Hazel.

Jennie Douglass Slayton

Something serious must have happened in the next few years to shatter this family. Julia apparently either divorced John F. Burnham or he died, for by 1914 she had married a farm laborer named Carroll G. Brown. By 1920, young C. Stanley Slayton was living with his mother, boarding where she worked as a housekeeper.

Charles Foster Slayton had a worse fate. According to his death certificate, he died at age 65 on June 24, 1919 at the Vermont State Hospital. The certificate notes he had been committed to the mental institution on April 15, 1912. The cause of death was acute peritonitis brought about by a fight three days earlier with another patient/inmate that left him with abdominal injuries. The secondary cause of death was his mental illness, listed as paranoia.

Death Certificate for Charles Slayton

The mental illness may explain his inability to keep a wife. Perhaps Jennie and Clara divorced him when they couldn’t deal with his mental state anymore. The bigger question is why did they marry him in the first place? Surely the sisters talked to each other. Living in the same area, they must have witnessed his “paranoia”, or at least heard gossip from family and friends. There can only be one explanation: he must have been incredibly charming when he was lucid, and possibly very attractive as well.