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Valentine’s Day Competition: Family romances

  • By Aaron
February 4, 2015
Valentine’s Day Competition: Family romances

On February 14, we will celebrate Valentine’s Day, the festival of romance.

Do you know of interesting marriage proposals in your family? Or, stories of long-lost loves or wedding celebrations?

In honor of the day of love, we want to pay tribute to the heartwarming stories of the couples in your family.

Just comment below, by February 12, about these stories in your family, and what makes them the most romantic couple by.

We’ll select our favorites to be featured in our blog, and one winner with the most romantic story will win a PremiumPlus subscription.

We look forward to reading your family romantic memories and stories below.

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  • Heather Wilkinson Rojo

    February 4, 2015

    “William Cogswell, when a lad, was out from home by the highway, where some men were trying in vain to relieve a cow who had become choked with a potato. There stood by, also, a young girl, eight or ten years old, who watched with interest every effort made. When all experiments failed, and it was suggested that only by someone thrusting his hand down the cow’s throat would the cow be saved, she at once said, “My arm is small; I can do it best; you hold her mouth.” They did so, and she drew out the potato, to the great relief of the poor cow and all present. The young lad said to himself, “That young miss, by and by, shall be my wife.” from the compiled genealogy book “The Cogswells in America” book originally published in 1884 by the Rev. E. O. Jameson. The William Cogswell mentioned in the story is nephew of my ancestor John Cogswell, who was born about 1622 in England and lived in the Chebacco Parish of Ipswich, Massachusetts. He arrived in the New World aboard the “Angel Gabriel”, which shipwrecked in Maine. William Cogswell, the nephew, was born in 1659, and he finally married little Martha Emerson in 1685.

  • Kathy Kraus

    February 4, 2015

    My parents met in the South Pacific during WWII. My mother joined the wacs the day the opened! My Dad was walking down a dirt road as a bus come at his direction! Saw his future wife on that bus. Married 4/2/45. Her ring was made from dental gold provide by the camp dentist

  • Mike Gallagher

    February 6, 2015

    My Great Grandparents Patrick and Mary grew up in rural County Mayo Ireland in the mid 1800’s and lived in adjacent townlands. Patrick and Mary were seeing each other and although Patrick was in love with her, Mary decided she didn’t want to see him anymore and at the age of about 20 she left Ireland to live with relatives in Boston MA. Patrick was forlorn and in 1877, having somehow gathered together enough money for the trip, he travelled to Boston to find her and ask her hand in marriage. The were married on 6th Sep 1877 at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, Boston, Massachusetts. They moved back to Mayo, before moving again to Wigan where they lived for the rest of their lives.

  • Elaine Sunray

    February 7, 2015

    My mother, Pearl Feldbrand, was a sixteen year old high school student in 1940 when her twenty year old sister informed her that a young air corps soldier stationed at Hickam Field in Hawaii would be sending her (Mom) a letter. My aunt Miriam told Mom that she and my uncle Abe Krieger (her fiancé at the time), went into a neighborhood jewelry store (owned by my father’s two brothers) in the Bronx (New York), were casually speaking to my uncles when one thing led to another. When my uncles said they had a nineteen year old brother at Hickam Field in Hawaii, my aunt said she had a sixteen year old sister, and that perhaps they’d like to write to one another.
    And so it was that my mother and father met and fell in love, first as pen pals for three years, and then as a married couple in September, 1943, three months after Dad returned from service.
    As Mom tells it, “Your father called me when he got back to the mainland, and to his parents’ home in Port Chester, New York. It was the first time I heard his voice! We made arrangements to meet at a particular entrance to Penn (Train) Station. I bought a blue dress and new shoes, and was, of course, very nervous, but excited too. I looked and looked around the place we were to meet. Of course Penn Station was crowded with service men and women. After waiting for a while, I saw a man leaning against a nearby wall reading a newspaper that was obscuring his face. I walked over and asked, “Michael?” He lowered the paper and immediately picked me up with a kiss and spun me around. It was just like in the movies. Just so romantic! And now you know the first moment of how we met face to face.”
    My mother is now ninety-one years old. She has her wedding dress , feathered had, and leather gloves she wore for the wedding gently packed in a small saved war period suitcase, together with my father’s military cap and shirt.
    Dad died in December 1982. The memories and stories of my mother’s life so many years ago are as vivid today as they were when I was growing up. No matter how many times I hear the stories, I am grateful to my parents and the romantic way they met.

  • Chris Wright

    February 7, 2015

    My mother met my father when she, and her future sister-in-law took a coastal cruise ship, the Elsanna, to Cairns, Australia. He was an engineer on the ship. My mother was lying back on a deck-chair sunbaking, when she was dazzled by a handsome officer as he appeared from below deck in his white uniform, which was almost glowing as the sun hit it.

    When they arrived in Cairns, there was a wharfies strike and they ended up staying on the ship a week longer than was scheduled. (I wonder if my father ‘engineered’ that somehow – his father being a wharfie and one of the Union organisers). My mother wrote an excited postcard to her mother about the officers & engineers being really special, ‘especially’ Barrie a 4th engineer.

    The attraction between the two must also have been noticed by others on the ship as they jokingly ‘offered’ my mother a job as his assistant. The enamoured couple went dancing together in Townsville, swimming and visiting Magnetic Island during the trip. My mother was obviously stricken as she wrote to her mother wishing she was continuing her trip on the ship to Thursday Island rather than her desination at Cairns.

    They married at Herston Methodist Church in Brisbane on 21 Dec 1957. This was the start of a 55 year marriage which only ended with the death of my mother in 2012.

    Although this is not in his stunning white uniform, here you can see how my handsome father enchanted my mother http://bit.ly/1DqOeD9 and here is the happy couple aboard the ship http://bit.ly/1LZGz2k.

  • Hereward Pooley

    February 8, 2015

    My maternal grandfather had never married. He was fifty five or six. He was a Protestant in Ireland before the First World War. He thought a nephew of his should have a wife. He introduced him to the daughter of a drinking buddy who had grown up in Catholic convents. She was nineteen. After three meetings he commanded her to marry him instead. They were very happy and had a daughter, my mother. A year after the birth he died and his wife “Never looked at another man”. She was killed by a bomb in London at the beginning of the Second world War. My mother was one hundred last year.

  • Janett Bradley

    February 10, 2015

    My great grandmother lived in the Canary Islands, a colonized spanish country off the coast of Africa, with several of her brothers and sisters. A couple of her brothers would come to Cuba as migrant workers to plant and harvest tobacco and return after a season to the Canarys. On one of their trips they accidentally dropped a picture of their sister in the field where they planted the tobacco and the owner of the field found
    Her picture. He was completely taken by her beauty and From that moment on he inquired about her and began courting her through love letters. One day in the early early 1900’s my great grandmother decided to travel to Cuba and said ” I will go to Cuba to see if I like this man and if so I will stay” and they lived happily ever after in Cuba. This picture, although, battered and old exist today and treasured in our family as a beautiful love story and history of the reason why we are part Canarian

  • Loretta Pedersen

    February 10, 2015

    My Great Grandmother, Frances Caroline Potter, (Fanny) was first married in Trowell, Nottingham in July 1, 1871. She and her husband, John Dixon from Kidderminster, Worcester had two children. They were living in St. Helier, on Isle of Jersey, Channel Islands, when John Dixon suddenly passed away in 1881. Fanny stayed in St. Helier, and eventually met my Great Grandfather, George Lenoard Symonds (Simmonds). He was a handsome 20 year old at the time, working at the British Star Hotel, (10 years younger than Grt Grandma Fanny) when he meets, falls in love with and sweeps this beautiful widow off her feet. They were married Feb. 18, 1882 in Guernsey, Channel Islands and my Grandfather, George Edward Symonds, was born in St. Helier in Dec 1882. They moved back to England and had two more children. I don’t have a photo of them, but the fact that my Grandfather was a very handsome man, and my Mother (also called Frances) was a very beautiful lady, I know my Great Grandparents were a stunning couple.