Carl Herman, a Wabash Valley Tapscott

Born of Joseph and Mary Emma (Sanders) Tapscott in Clark County, Illinois, on 10 May 1894, Carl was wedded four times, but apparently left no biological offspring (18 Aug 2015 blog). We have already heard about his first marriage, to Nettie Sarah Sweitzer 19 Oct 1918, which lasted less than two years.

Carl’s third marriage, to Beulah Frances Mead on 3 Jul 1939 in Vigo County, Indiana, was also short with a divorce suit filed almost exactly two years later. Married six times in Vigo County, to five different men (one man was wedded twice), Beulah was a most interesting character. Each of her six marriage license applications gives a birth date of 5 Feb but a different year – 1898, 1897, 1896, 1899, 1901, and 1900. Her death record gives an age corresponding to a birth year of 1902. She was almost certainly born in 1900. Beulah also tended to stretch other things on her license applications. When she married Carl, Beulah claimed to have been married only once before. In fact, she had been married three times before (four times if you include her two marriages to husband number three).

Beulah, like many people, tended to make herself older in her early years (she was first married at age 15) and younger in her later years, but the changes were minor compared with that of Carl Tapscott’s fourth wife, Pauline Benefiel, who was probably born as “Perlina” in 1870 and who knocked a "massive" fourteen years off her age when she married Carl. All this goes to show that you cannot trust marriage records when determining birth dates and prior marriages, and by no means are women always the culprits.

St. Anthony's Hospital, c1945 (Ancestry.com).

Like Carl, many of the Wabash Valley Tapscott men were not good husband material. Among the children of John Wesley Tapscott, my father, Glenn, was the only one of the boys to have had a family with children. My uncles Russell and Ralph (“Jack”) never married. Uncle Clarence’s two marriages were short and Lloyd was nearly 43 when he married. We cannot include Willard, who died young.

Pauline and Carl lived out their lives in Terre Haute, Indiana. Pauline died 28 Feb 1952, with Carl surviving her by fourteen years. Like his cousin Golden, Carl had a less than perfect driving record, but his greatest automotive difficulties came when he was not behind the steering wheel. Just three days before his 72 birthday, on 7 May 1966, he was hit by a Terre Haute driver. He spent his birthday in St. Anthony Hospital, where he died six days after the accident.

Carl was laid to rest in Mt. Pleasant Cemetery, near Martinsville, where his mother, Mary, and father, Joseph, are also interred. His former spouses rest elsewhere—Nettie in Marshall Cemetery; Mary Theresa in Terre Haute’s Highland Lawn Cemetery; Beulah in Lexington, Kentucky; and Pauline in Trimble Cemetery, Sullivan County, Indiana.