Divorce Comes From Out of the Blue

You have to love newspapers. Public records give you the bones, birth, death, marriage dates, but the newspapers give you the meat that fills out a person.

One of my husband's greatgrandmother's cousins was involved in a scandalous divorce suit in Omaha in 1929, one so juicy it made the front pages of the Omaha World Herald.

Frank Sheldon Selby left Omaha for Army reserve training camp at Camp Sparta, Wisconsin. Our ancestor's cousin Mary Norris Selby saw her husband off at the train station, as she always did, and kissed him a fond goodbye.

The next day he wrote her a letter asking her to divorce him. She was shocked! After she wrote him back "No," he telegraphed her that he'd instructed his attorney to file a petition for divorce. He'd talked to them before he left town.

The newspaper articles on the subsequent trial was full of his testimony about her cruelty to him. She scratched him, kept him from his family and threatened to commit suicide several times. She denied or explained everything. The judge said the testimony was contradictory, and hoped they'd work it out, but Frank Selby said he'd never live with his wife again. The judge finally ruled they couldn't possibly live together after all this, and granted the divorce. Mary wasn't granted any alimony, but was awarded the houshold furniture.

She appealed the settlement to the Nebraska Supreme Court, and lost.

She moved to Huntington Park, California and died there in 1986, never remarrying. Frank stayed in Omaha and remarried a few years after the divorce.

In a sad and ironic note, her father did commit suicide back in Omaha.