Family History Series ~ "Matchmaker, Matchmaker..."

We now know that Jonas and Salomėja had met in a German refugee/work camp, even though the details of how Jonas got there are very vague.

She was merely 17 while he was already a worldly 28 ~ and possibly an old man in a young girl's eyes.

With her diminutive grace, steel-grey eyes, and luxuriously long, wavy dark hair, Salomėja must have caught the eye of many a young man. She certainly caught Jonas's eye.

Jonas wasn't so shabby himself.

Standing a head taller than Salomėja, Jonas had dark, soulful eyes that matched his dark wavy hair. In photographs he looked like Clark Gable or Gary Cooper in a black wool coat with a rolled cigarette dangling rakishly between his gloved fingers. (Oh! How I would love to find that photo!)

Apparently Jonas was not oblivious to his good looks. My mother told me that he would say to her that women would lick their lips whenever he walked by.

Despite the eleven year gulf that spanned between them, Jonas was quite enamored with Salomėja . She liked him too ~ but only as a friend.

Of course, her rejection of Jonas as a suitor was enough to plunge him into disheartening despair.

Yet fear not! Help was on the way.

It seemed that Salomėja's father, Antanas, thought that Jonas would make a fine match for his beautiful and vivacious (perhaps too vivacious in Dad's eye) daughter ~ as well as provide him with the male companionship that was lacking in a house full of women.

And this was not going to be the first time that Antanas plied his matchmaking skills.

However, there was one hitch to Jonas and Salomėja getting hitched.

Salomėja was still a minor in the German legal system; and she needed both parents to sign the permission papers before she could be married in Germany.

That was going to be a bit of a problem because Salomėja's mother, Ieva, supported her daughter's desire to strictly remain friends with Jonas ~ not to marry him and be his wife.

After all, the war was coming close to an end; and there was a bright future ahead of her. Salomėja wanted to go back to school to become a teacher and marry a boy closer in age.

Of course, Antanas, being the head of the household, would not hear of it. He was going to marry off his daughter ASAP before she HAD to get married ~ like his own sisters. Antanas wasn't going to pass up the perfect suitor either, for that matter.

In order to follow through with his plan, Antanas enlisted the help of a priest ~ a priest who must have been asleep in his morals and ethics classes when he was still in seminary.

The priest approached Ieva and asked her if she knew how to sign her name. In those days, this was not an unusual question as illiteracy was far more wide-spread back then.

Of course she knew how to sign her name! Ieva was an educated woman.

Then prove it by signing this paper.

This paper happened to be written in German. And although Ieva was gifted in a few languages, German was not one of them.

What she had signed was a legal document allowing her under-age daughter to marry a man eleven years her senior.

The wedding took place.

Fräulein Salomėja no more.

Welcome, junge Frau.

To be continued....