this post was submitted on 11 May 2024
155 points (96.4% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35306 readers
810 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

all 26 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] neidu2@feddit.nl 85 points 4 months ago (3 children)

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 24 points 4 months ago
[–] BarbecueCowboy@kbin.social 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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 11 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

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.

And yes, I wrote perl and not something newer. Suck my camel hump, it's how I roll.

[–] BarbecueCowboy@kbin.social 8 points 4 months ago

With ancestry, yeah, that's going to suck and it's the bigger database, but with familysearch, you've got an API:

https://www.familysearch.org/developers/docs/api/resources

Not sure what your limits are.

[–] Blizzard@lemmy.zip 7 points 4 months ago

Now I'm even more interested to see the SQL query.

[–] Alto@kbin.social 56 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

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.

Some of the detail might be off, going off of memory, but that's the general gist.

EDIT:
So I went to double check, and I got a fair bit of it wrong.

Irene Triplett
She was actually the daughter of the woman I thought I was talking about. Her mother married her father at ages 29 and 78 respectively, and she was born one of five children in 1930, living until the age of 90 before passing in 2020.

[–] idiomaddict@feddit.de 15 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It sounds like you’re thinking of Helen Viola Jackson. I didn’t know that, but it was at the bottom of your Wikipedia link :)

[–] Alto@kbin.social 6 points 4 months ago

Ah yep, you're right that's the one I was thinking of. Both are pretty interesting, forget how young this country is sometimes.

[–] AmidFuror@fedia.io 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

Let's say he was 18 at the end of the war on 1865. That was 159 years ago. They have to split that time between his remaining lifetime and all of hers after she's old enough to marry. It's possible they both lived to nearly 100.

Less plausible is that his pension would go to a spouse he married after he retired from the service. Anyone know anything about that in modern times?

[–] Alto@kbin.social 6 points 4 months ago

So I went to double check, and I got a fair bit of it wrong.

Irene Triplett
She was actually the daughter of the woman I thought I was talking about. Her mother married her father at ages 29 and 78 respectively, and she was born one of five children in 1930, living until the age of 90 before passing in 2020.

[–] zout@fedia.io 3 points 4 months ago

It could have happened, if Helen Viola Jackson would have applied for the pension.

[–] bobburger@fedia.io 2 points 4 months ago

It was a pretty common phenomenon. Wikipedia article about the subject

[–] TheDoozer@lemmy.world 47 points 4 months ago (2 children)

This is the type of thing that could be answered if people followed banal statistical data the way sports people follow sports data.

"This is the first time since 2017 they've scored over 30 points in the third quarter in a home game during the pre-season."

[–] SkipWapPallyPap@lemmy.world 18 points 4 months ago

Honestly it would be kind of fun to hear those statistics. “This is the first time in 10 years SkipWapPallyPap has remembered an important before the date”.

[–] dogsnest@lemmy.world 7 points 4 months ago

.....on the first Sunday after the first full moon, post Vernal equinox.

[–] Kraven_the_Hunter@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Honestly, the answer probably involves a child bride somewhere..

[–] SkipWapPallyPap@lemmy.world 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I was thinking more along the lines of geriatric and quick turn around…

[–] Kraven_the_Hunter@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

That could work too. So like Anna Nicole Smith. Don't know if she remarried though.

[–] KazuyaDarklight@lemmy.world 16 points 4 months ago (1 children)

IMO, rather personal, and not statistically valuable information. Someone would need to scour endless records from different sources combining the info together and at best, they'd end up with a Guinness world record entry of some sort. Depending on the quality and age of records too you're likely going to run into issues distinguishing people of the same name somewhere along the line.

[–] SkipWapPallyPap@lemmy.world 21 points 4 months ago

True but that to me is why this question is kind of stupid. Luckily this community empowers me to ask questions like this.

[–] deegeese@sopuli.xyz 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Sounds like a really complicated way to avoid probate.

[–] half_built_pyramids@lemmy.world 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

What's the remarry time frame limit? We talking next day?

[–] SkipWapPallyPap@lemmy.world 4 points 4 months ago

Nah just in general. I mean it would work even if they get married the day before they pass away as long as their spouse gets married again and continues the cycle.