Marriage Rate Triples After 1906 Quake

Apr. 7 (KGO) -- Shortly after the quake, as people tried to resume a life of normalcy, an amazing trend occurred -- the marriage rate in San Francisco actually tripled. Why? Two researchers have the answers.

Ron Filion: "Within the 30 days after the fire and earthquake, Grant Munson the county clerk estimated that if City Hall was actually open there would have been almost 700 people that came in for marriage licenses. So far we've had a list of over 600 people that have been married and that doesn't include the whole San Francisco Bay Area."

There are thousands of photographs and more than a hundred books that document the destruction of San Francisco by the great quake. They provide eyewitness accounts of a city in crisis.

Ron Filion and his partner Pamela Storm Wolkskill run the website SFGenealogy.com. They're digging deeper into the family's histories of those who survived. Amid the rubble and ruin, San Franciscans began to rebuild their lives in ways they might not have expected.

Ron Filion: "Their residences were gone, they were burned down, you know, they didn't exist any longer so they either ended up in the refugee camps or they ended up with other relatives in other cities."

Through newspaper archives and various artifacts, they found countless descriptions of tragedy, but a unique human phenomenon was also being reported. Despite the extremely difficult circumstances surrounding them or perhaps because of them, couples were getting married and they were doing it in record numbers.

Ron Filion: "So I was going through the newspapers and I kept finding these news articles about people that were getting married and it was a lot of hype surrounding them."

Many got married for obvious reasons: he need for comfort and companionship especially after a disaster. But there were other motives to get married.

Ron Filion: " "Now there were other incidences where some people got married because it was cheaper to rent a room. There's actually one article about where a couple got together cause it's cheaper renting one room rather than renting two rooms. So, I mean, that type of stuff happens but I don't think that was as common."

Local historian Woody LaBounty is actively involved in efforts to save the few remaining earthquake shacks here in the city. Ironically, his great-grandparents, Milton Slinkey and Ethel Neate, met during their stay in one of those similar shacks.

Ron Filion: "His grandparents were left homeless by the fire and they ended up in the refugee camps where they met, they fell in love and they actually got married that November."

Many couples were so determined to be married immediately, in spite of the unsettling circumstances surrounding them in the days and weeks following the earthquake and fire. Throughout their research, Filion and Wolkskill came to the conclusion that the earthquake propelled a majority of couples to get married because they were heading for the altar anyway.

Ron Filion: "People were motivated to do what they were going to do in the first place and they were gonna do it quicker so basically people had been dating or courting back then got married rather than just waiting. And we found most of the couples were representative of all the different factors, but the majority were probably based on that, that they got it done quicker than what they would have normally done."

Filion and Wolkskill hope every family keeps records of as much information about themselves as possible because you never know when it will be considered as a part of history.

Ron Filion: "What we're hoping to do is to get people to look into their own family history. Everybody has a really great story to tell. These are just connected to one, you know, important event that happened but everybody's story affects life as we know it. People should be writing down what their grandparents did what their great grandparents did and pass it onto their kids. This is going to be important one day."

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