Life, Death, and Detective Work: How 'I Do's and Adieus Aid Investigations
On this date, September 18, in 1851, the first edition of the paper now known as The New York Times was published. It included reference to the marriage of Sarah Mullett and John Grant, informing readers the ceremony tying the couple in matrimony was held in Fredonia, New York at the Trinity Episcopal Church. The inaugural wedding announcement in the newspaper’s first edition and its progeny are treated in this 2017 retrospective the color and details of which illustrate why these announcements are always of interest to investigators.
Wedding announcements are one member of a small family of what we at 221B Partners think of as lifecycle information reporting that can seem, at first glance, to be rather pedestrian but which can, in fact, be incredibly valuable for their ability to confirm identity, fill in (or point to) gaps in professional history, identify previous marriages or otherwise telegraph information around a family’s wealth and other associations. These details and associations are valuable data points for our due diligence and background investigation assignments, but can also be relevant for other projects such as asset searches or witness identifications.
These and other research exercises are fundamentally governed by the way we as investigators and our clients think and consume information: the visible and invisible organizational principles of which are time and relationships. That means our findings about subjects of interest unfold along the linear chronology of a personal and professional life. We identify and report family and educational background and from there segue into a treatment of the subject's professional career development overlaid with business, social, philanthropic and other affiliations.
This timeline can also be punctuated by, among others, personal milestones such as marriage, children, divorce and death of spouse, siblings or parents, all of which are often found in these lifecycle announcements, which also include, of course, obituaries. When we are digging into the backgrounds of subjects with common names, an obituary announcement can, for example, support proper identification of a subject through the list of family members, spouses, grandchildren or the hometown or military background of the deceased. An obituary might likewise place a subject in a company or business with a sibling, parent, in-law or adult child which can be meaningful and revealing in the context of an investigation or due diligence.
Meanwhile, engagement or wedding announcements often report a subject’s pedigree or bona fides, so may reflect undergraduate and graduate degrees and can, as with an obituary, be useful in establishing identities of parents and/or step-parents, time spent living abroad, high school and key relationships by virtue of reporting on the wedding party. We once came across at 221B an extraordinary wedding announcement published in a regional paper in the South.
The account of this marriage, which ran, in fact, for several thousand words, was like stepping through the looking glass into the fabric of an antebellum social circle: it detailed the orchestra hired to accompany the ceremony, the coastal estate rented by the parents to host the event, described at length about the exquisite tailoring and features of the bride’s gown, provided background and color on the political and commercial ties of the families in the wedding party and broadly telegraphed the commitment of the bride’s and groom’s families to underwrite an extravagant ceremony.
All of this, of course, does not amount to a sensational claim sourced in a court record which might call into question the integrity of an executive who is the prospective leader of a client’s portfolio interest, but in the aggregate the basic investigative arithmetic that can be added together through these information sources is a bit like compound interest. It adds up nicely.