Lemen Orlo Hopkins

Notes:

DIVORCED AND MARRIED — ALL IN THE SAME WEEK

A marriage with a Scranton end to it was performed yesterday in St. Louis in the office of a justice of the peace that has some stage trimmings.

Last Monday Judge Edwards handed down a decree in divorce, breaking the bonds of matrimony between Lemen O. Hopkins and Emily Aristine McCumber Hopkins. They were married in Perry, a small New York State town, in 1888, and lived for a short time with her folks.

Mr. Hopkins is a whip salesman, with headquarters for the past two years in Scranton. He rooms at Hotel Schadt.

Fifteen years after the marriage they moved to Brooklyn and had an apartment in a rooming‑house which had for its other occupants a number of actors.

She got stage‑struck and told her husband she could make more money behind the footlights. He told her if that was the way she looked at it to go ahead, and she left home and got a part in one of the midway stunts at the St. Louis exposition in 1903.

Soon thereafter she got a divorce of some kind and married a man named Alfred Bertrand.

Last fall she found out the divorce was invalid and that the ceremony uniting her to Bertrand was a nuptial fluke.

Mr. Hopkins started divorce proceedings in this county last December on the ground of desertion, and retained Attorneys S. B. Price and Cole B. Price to get it for him. She heard of the case and gave Attorney George L. Peck power to appear for her and see that she didn’t get the worst of it.

The evidence adduced reflected on her character only to say she joined a vaudeville team with an actor and traveled on the road with him.

When the news of the Scranton divorce reached St. Louis, Bertrand and the woman, who goes by the stage name of Emily Aristine Durkee, appeared before Justice Luce in St. Louis yesterday and were married again. Bertrand has a fine tenor voice and warbled operatic airs while waiting for the justice to dig up the marriage form.
(The Times-Tribune, Scranton, Pennsylvania, Saturday, August 19, 1911)

Lemen married Emily Artistine McCumber in 1888 in Perry, Wyoming County, New York, and was divorced on 14 Aug 1911 in Scranton, Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]

Lemen married Prudence Adams on 2 Jan 1912 in Honeoye, Ontario County, New York. Prudence (daughter of Alden A. Adams and Lorena E. Short) was born in ca 1849 in Richmond, Ontario County, New York; died in 1928; was buried in Lakeview Cemetery, Honeoye, Ontario County, New York. [Group Sheet] [Family Chart]