& btw, no, I don’t for a moment believe there was a standard issue marriage certificate available in Stanley Ann’s case. If there were, the excerpt I have posted from Dreams from my Father would be nonsensical gibberish. Ayers is an America-hating radical terrorist, but he’s not stupid. He wouldn’t hang an illegitimate birth around Obama’s neck for the heck of it. I explained his reasons for including that passage up thread. There is no other possible motive for putting such a ‘murky’ reference in Dreams. The ‘wedding’ was irregular *at best*.
Most of Dreams from my Father IS nonsensical gibberish.
The way I read that quote is that it wasn’t your typical happy-day wedding with all the trimmings (white dress, family, party and cake and happy, smiling photo album). It was a bare bones affair done in an almost shameful manner; an inter-racial marriage with a barely 18 year old, pregnant bride. It was, nonetheless, a legal wedding.
If there was no wedding, there’s no need for a divorce. If there was no wedding in Hawaii, the divorce documents wouldn’t have referred to it and the judge wouldn’t have signed off that he’d seen ‘due proof’ to that fact and it wouldn’t have appeared in the official Hawaii Index of Marriages for that era.