I’m thinking along the lines of older spouse dies, younger spouse marries someone younger and becomes the older spouse. Then older spouse dies again and repeat. Has anything like this happened in a long enough chain to be significant? Is it so mundane no one cares?
Not at all an answer to your question, but a very semi-related tangent.
The last receipt of a US Civil War pension passed away relatively recently. She was a young woman who would regularly help out a local older man, a civil war vet with no kids or family otherwise. Towards the end of his days, he married her so she'd get the benefits of his pension, as things were really really tough.
neidu2@feddit.nl 7 months ago
That’s a really interesting question, but I’m having a hard time seeing how one can look this up without direct access to an SQL database of all married people. Can we pay off some government sysadmin?
SkipWapPallyPap@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I’m in!
BarbecueCowboy@kbin.social 7 months ago
The data is mostly already there and publicly maintained. Ancestry/familysearch/etc should get us something interesting at least, data is a little bit light outside the us but someone would just need to go through it.
neidu2@feddit.nl 7 months ago
This sounds like a job for a weird spaghetti code contraption consisting of selenium, perl, DBI, postgres, and shitloads of caffeine. I’ll give it a look tomorrow, hoping that the captcha I assume is there can be circumvented or automated one way or another.
I’m not really interested in the people, as I’m not from the US and am unlikely to be related to any of them. I’m just curious about the dataset itself, especially in relation to OPs question.
Blizzard@lemmy.zip 7 months ago
Now I’m even more interested to see the SQL query.