Behind the scenes: how Michael discovered the date of Sabrina's wedding.

Michael T reports (7 Feb 2003) how he discovered Sabrina's marriage date.

I just confirmed the exact date of Sabrina's marriage to Harold Melsheimer!

They were married in Los Angeles county on November 21st, 1967. At the time, 'Harold Melsheimer' gave his age as 40, and 'Norma A. Sykes' gave hers as 29. This means either the date of birth that you have for Sabrina - February 2nd, 1936 - is incorrect, or that she lied about her age on her marriage certificate. If she told the truth, then she was born between November 22nd 1937, and November 21st, 1938.

Of course, "29" is a nice number because it lacks the horrid digit "3" at the start! Ed.

This also confirms that the Harold Melsheimer whose entry you found at USHistory.org is almost certainly the correct one, since to be 40 when they married, he would have had to be born between November 22nd, 1926 and November 21st, 1927. The fact that he gave his age as 74 on the USHistory.org website suggests his birthday is between November 22nd, 1926 and January 26th, 1927 (although of course, he could have rounded his age up when he wrote that text.)

Here's the exact entry from the VitalSearch database:

• Groom_Last_Name :MELSHEIMER
• Groom_First_Name: HAROLD
• Groom Age: 40
• Bride_Last_Name: SYKES
• Bride_First_Name: NORMA A
• Bride Age: 29
• Year Month Day: 1967 11 21
• Marriage_County: LOS ANGELES

You can repeat this search yourself by going to:

http://www.vitalsearch-ca.com/gen/ca/_vitals/cam_960to85m-nopsm.htm

...and entering Bride_Last_Name as Sykes, Bride_First_Name as Norma, and Bride_Middle_Initial as A. If anybody is a Premium Member of VitalSearch, you can apparently access the actual scanned document from which the above information was scanned and converted.

I searched for both Harold Melsheimer and his bride in the Death indices at both VitalSearch and Rootsweb and thankfully found nothing.

Melsheimer is apparently not a California native, as there is no record of a Harold Melsheimer being born in California, nor of any Melsheimers being born there in 1926 or 1927. I also couldn't find any record of children born in California to anyone with the surname Melsheimer, whose wife's birth surname was given as Sykes.

The 1957 Sabrina seemed most unwilling to have children . - Ed.

I'll let you know if I find anything more... :)

Cheers

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Michael T

Well done, Michael! That's the sort of Sabrina stuff we like to see!