In the late 1980s, Lynne Gold-Bikin started an unusual collection, mostly by accident. Her husband, Martin, was an avid antiquer, and Gold-Bikin decided she should have something to hunt for while he, a neurologist, scoured markets for old-fashioned medical instruments. She chose marriage licenses.
Over the next three decades Gold-Bikin acquired hundreds of them—as well as marriage certificates, wedding invitations, bridal photographs, and other once-precious personal documents of people she had never met. At its broadest, the collection spanned from the New Jersey nuptials of David Thomas and Helena Van Boskerk in June 1728 (“the first Year of the Reign of our Sovereign Lord GEORGE the Second”) to the 2013 marriage of Loreen M. Bloodgood and Alicia A. Terrizzi, the first same-sex couple to wed in Pennsylvania, before it was even clear their union would be recognized in the commonwealth. Gold-Bikin framed scores of these marriage mementos and displayed them in the hallways of the Norristown, Pennsylvania, law firm where she worked as one of the country’s top divorce attorneys.
“I want people to believe in marriage,” Gold-Bikin explained to the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2017. She didn’t think that celebrating marriage was incompatible with guaranteeing access to divorce. When she started practicing law in the 1970s, Pennsylvania still required those seeking divorce to prove that their spouse was at “fault” in the breakup of the marriage, a requirement that led to the public airing of private matters, false accusations, and the existence of divorce destinations like Reno, Nevada. The commonwealth was one of the last to institute a no-fault divorce code—with Gold-Bikin’s help—in 1980, and she continued to fight for that necessary provision throughout her career.
“Who are we kidding?” she asked the Pennsylvania legislature in 1996 when they considered eliminating the no-fault option. “Unhappy people do not stay together, regardless of the law.” She instead advocated for programs that set people up for successful relationships. “The answer is not looking at the end of the unhappy marriage but the beginning, or even before the beginning, of the marriage,” she said.
Gold-Bikin’s collection does just that, providing a snapshot of the first moments of a union. Before her death in 2018, Gold-Bikin donated the documents she had amassed to her alma mater, Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania, from which she graduated in 1973. The portion of the collection shared by the college via JSTOR offers a glimpse into the ever-changing legal, religious, and societal trappings of weddings in the United States across centuries and cultures. There are curt legal documents, elaborately designed religious ones, and many that reveal how deeply intertwined are government and religion when it comes to questions of marriage.
And then there are wholly unexpected finds, like an invitation to the marriage of one Miss Jennie June and a Mr. Tom Thumb. A guest arriving at the Second Presbyterian Church in Rahway, New Jersey, on the evening of Thursday, June 25, 1914, would have known what to expect: a cast of dozens of children dressed up in wedding finery playing out every role of a traditional wedding. The oddity had as its inspiration the 1863 nuptials of Charles Stratton (better known as Col. Tom Thumb) and Lavinia Warren, two circus performers with dwarfism who were so beloved by the American public that their “Fairy Wedding” knocked the Civil War off the front pages. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, such events were popular church fundraisers, serving as both instruction in societal expectation for the children and comic relief for the adults.
Most of the documents in the Gold-Bikin collection capture the lives of a couple and their community at a single instance. But one of the marriage certificates in the collection—one of Gold-Bikin’s favorites—tells a much longer story. In cramped script, the life of Atlantica Bispham unfurls. She was born in 1737, to Mary and Joseph, on a ship on the Atlantic and so named by the ship’s captain, who presented the newborn with a silk dress; a small piece of the striped fabric is attached to the yellowed paper. In 1757 she was married to Joseph Stokes in the presence of their families and their Quaker community in Burlington County in the Province of New Jersey; the names of their guests are memorialized on the certificate, too. Atlantica and Joseph had two children, Joshua and Sabilla, both of whom married. (Joshua three times.) The decades-long narrative on the marriage certificate ends there, but the recorded details are enough to trace Atlantica’s story through the centuries: She married again in 1774, after the death of her first husband, and bore four more children, all sons, before dying around the turn of the nineteenth century. Some of her descendants still live in Burlington County today.
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