Worship: Margot Was Not a Methodist ~ 52 Ancestors #13

... in fact, she was never particularly religious.

After graduating from college in 1956, my mother moved to Boston where she met my father when they both worked at the Boston Safe Deposit & Trust Company. Over the course of several years, they fell in love and wished to marry.

In the spring of 1963, my grandmother, Helen (Hunter) Copeland, a devoted Presbyterian, contacted several ministers in the Pittsburgh area (where she lived and where my mother grew up) to ask if they were available to marry her daughter and fiancé in the late summer or early fall of 1963. When a minister would say yes, he was available, he would begin to collect information about Helen's daughter and her intended. 

At this point, Helen would let him know that the wedding would have to wait until her future son-in-law's divorce was final. According to the story, this horrified several ministers that Helen spoke with and they refused to officiate at the wedding of a woman to a man who had just been divorced. I believe some were willing to marry the couple, but told Helen that the couple had to wait a year after the divorce to marry.

My parents didn't want to wait.

Helen was able to find a young Methodist minister who was willing to marry my parents in September. My father's divorce decree was final on August 13, less than seven weeks before his wedding to my mother.

Reverend Benton Robert McKee was pastor of the Ligonier Methodist Church from 1961 to 1975 according to a wonderful obituary at his FindAGrave memorial; he only recently died, in January 2023, at the age of 95.

Reverend McKee officiated at the very small family wedding of my parents on September 28, 1963, at the Ligonier, Pennsylvania home of my mother's Aunt Caroline and Uncle Bill Oliver. My mother did not wear the traditional white wedding dress.

Helen (Hunter) Copeland, Margot (Copeland) Pyle, Lowell Townsend Copeland, Charles McAlpin Pyle, Jr., and his mother, Elizabeth (Adsit) (Pyle) Rust.

Thank you to this wonderful minister who was willing to marry my parents, neither of whom was particularly religious, but who were very much in love.

I am taking liberties with this week's theme of Worship.