In the first two posts (
here and
here) about Nelson's marriage history, I covered his annulled marriage to Helen Hysell in 1909 and the unnamed wife listed on his 1917 draft registration. For this third and final installment I will try to untangle some of the details of his marriages to his last 2 wives.
On March 27th, 1919, shortly after leaving military service, Nelson married Genevieve Cover Finklestone in New York City. Genevieve was a divorcee and this was her second marriage. Interestingly, the marriage certificate indicates that this was Nelson's first marriage. So why did he list a wife on his draft registration two years earlier? At first I thought he may have lied in order to get out of serving, but that didn't seem to fit someone whose brother and grandfather both died in battle.
The answer was found in a voter registration list for 1916. Here is what was listed:
The wife of 1917 was the same one he married in 1919! So, what to make of the 1919 marriage? No record of an earlier marriage between the two has yet surfaced, so one possibility is that they were not married but living together under the guise of man and wife. More likely, however, is that Genevieve's divorce from her first husband was not finalized as they thought and Nelson discovered this during his time in New York during the end of the war. That would explain two things. First, Genevieve's last name on the marriage certificate is her married name, Finklestone, not her maiden name, Cover. Second, the timing of the marriage. If Nelson discovered the divorce situation while in New York, where Genevieve had married her first husband in 1913, he probably asked (or probably demanded) that she come back east to take care of the divorce and then get (re)married.
One question that remains unanswered is where did Nelson and Genevieve first meet? As she was living in New York City, it's most likely that it happened during one of his business trips to the city in 1914 when he was still working as a film exchange man. Perhaps it was their 'marriage' that prompted him to return to Los Angeles that year and begin a new career in photography. In any case, the 1919 marriage didn't last. The last record of them being together is the 1920 census; sometime between then and 1922, they divorced.
Nelson's last wife was Rosalie Knight. The two were married on January 21st, 1922 at the Madison Ave Methodist Episcopal Church in Manhattan. A few weeks later, the couple set sail for a honeymoon in Eygpt, eventually returning the the States at the end of June. Sadly, this marriage ended just a few months later when Nelson died at the age of 33.
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| Rosalie at age 14 |
After Nelson's death, Rosalie returned to New York, eventually remarrying in 1934. Her third and last husband was Carl Schraubstader, whose one claim to fame is writing the music to oft-recorded hit song "Last Night on the Back Porch" in 1923 while a student at Cornell University. Rosalie was 11 years Carl's senior, although she seems to have cut 12 years off her age on various records (when she married Nelson, she listed her age on the marriage certificate as 26, although she was actually 30). Rosalie and Carl remained married until her death in 1979.
So there you have the history of Nelson Evans' marriages. Four weddings, three women, two wives. A man truly not lucky in love.
