ScottyWolfe
Glynn Wolfe was born on 1908 Jul 25 and died 1997 Jun 10. He was a baptist
minister in Blythe, California, who had 29 consecutive monogamous
marriages. He made the Guinness Book of Records, and married wife number 29,
Linda Lou Essex, from Anderson, Indiana the most married woman, as a stunt for a
British documentary.
Both were not just listed for most marriages, but for most divorces as well.
Linda Essex was married 23 times to 15 different men; she divorced and then
remarried some of them. Glyn Wolfe divorced all but his last wife, Linda Essex.
Wikipedia has a list of all 29 wives.
According to what appears to be a newspaper story posted on John Bauer’s Strange but True page, none of his wives bothered to arrange his funeral.
Back in 2004, the BBC News reported that Kamarudin Mohammed married 53 times. All his marriages ended in divorce, end his 53rd marriage was to his first wife. She agreed to remarry him if he gave up his hobby of marrying repeatedly.
BBC News reports on the case of the 84-year old Nigerian Mohammed Bello
Abubakar, who has 86 wives and at least 170 children. The muslim preacher is
quoted saying that A man with 10 wives would collapse and die, but my own power is given by
Allah. That is why I have been able to control 86 of them
.
Many of his wives are younger than his children.
Update 2008-08-21: The Jamatu Nasril Islam, Nigeria’s Islamic authority has passed a verdict on Mohammed Bello Abubakar. Mohammed Bello Abubakar states that the Koran does not place a limit on the number wives. The JNI states that the sharia allows four wives, so he has to repent and choose four of them within three days, or he will be sentenced to death.
Googling turned up various more extreme cases, but without any reliable source to back these up. I’ve listed these cases near the end of this text.
After their first marriage in 1969, Richard and Carol Roble remarried each other 55 times, for a total of 56 marriages to each other.
From 1975 till today, Ting Ming Siong from Sibu, Sarawak was best man at more than a thousand weddings. As of 2006 Mar, he had been a wedding witness 1395 times already.
These are few cases I came across while googling around, for which I did not find anything resembling a reliable source.
Between 1949 and 1981, Giovanni Vigliotti married 104 women in 15 countries without telling any wife about the other wives, and managed to be married to four women at once. In 1983 an US judge sentenced him to 28 years for deceit and 6 years for bigamy.
Haj Ahmel, who was once Bey of Algeria, had 385 wives. These came from different parts of the world so that they could not gossip about him with one another.
The Belgian Adrienne Cuyot was engaged 652 times and married 53 times over a period of just 23 years.
These cases place a few practical demands on genealogy software.
It must be able to handle multiple marriages, including multiple marriages
between the same persons.
Genealogy software should be able to record hundreds of marriages and divorces
for a single person. It also should also be able to record that a single guy was
best man at more than a thousand different weddings.
I made good use of cut, copy and replace commands to construct a simple GEDCOM with one man, 1200 women, and 1200 marriages.
PAF 5 and Ancestral Quest 12 both read the file in just a few seconds, without errors or warnings, and display the wives in correct order.
GENViewer Lite fails to import the file with a privileged instruction
messagebox.
RootsMagic 3.2.6 imports the file in just a few seconds, but its other
spouses
menu does not show the wives in the correct order; it shows wives 999
through 1200 before wives 1 through 998.
Legacy 7 took nearly 40 minutes to import the file, that is an embarrassingly pathetic import speed that barely exceed half an INDI per second. Legacy Charting failed with an access violation, but at least it failed within a second.
Family Tree Builder imports the file in a few seconds, shows the wives in correct order, but is unresponsive, claims about 300 MB of RAM and annoys with a pop-up that the previous project is in an old format. That project was actually made with the same version, and I did not load it, but it was apparently auto-loaded in the background without my permission, after which the program gets confused about its own databases.
GenoPro 2007 imports the file in just a second but then draws all the wives
on top of each other, which is not just wrong, but also makes it practically
impossible to select the first wife through the graphical interface.
Relatives 1.1 refused the file because the first line was empty. After I
corrected that, the import was a bit slower than usual. Relatives needed maybe five
seconds to arrange the screen, and quite correctly displayed all the wives in a
long line of boxes to the left and the right of the husband, but these boxes
were no longer in the right order.
Family Tree Maker 2008 takes about 6 minutes, but boldly lies that it took
just 16,185 seconds to import 4804 records. FTM’s dialog box merrily claims
an import speed of 296 records per second, I estimate an actual import speed of (1201 / 360
s = ) 3,33 INDI records per second. The wives are in the right order, but
FTM 2008 has serious difficulty handling the small file; when I switch to Person
View, FTM 2008 becomes not responding
for roughly three minutes!
FTM 16 imported the file in just a few seconds, but produced 1101 warnings
stating that adding this individual as a spouse will exceed the maximum of 99
marriages for an individual, spouse is ignored
, so the import failed.
Brother’s Keeper 6.2.79 complains about the blank lines I left in the file
after its analyses, but does let me continue the import. It fails to import the
file with Error 6: overflow
.
Quite a few programs fail, a few are stunningly slow to import, some are surprisingly unresponsive once the data has been imported, and several do not show the wives in the right order.
Musikworld.de seems to have deleted their Kaum zu Glauben 2005 Jun: Giovanni Vigliotti post. The broken link has been removed.
The GeoCities page about Haj Ahmel & Addrienne Ciyot is no more. GeoCities has closed. The broken link has been removed
Tiong Ming Siong is still in The Malaysia Book of Records for most frequent best man, but they broke the link. The broken link has been removed.
Copyright © Tamura Jones. All Rights reserved.