I have a friend, was helping them do some family history and his parents had been married 7 years when they decided it might be time to split... they filed a 'dissolution' in California... at the time, the laws must have been different, because they had 3 1/2 kids and property and debt together... anyway, this is all we can find on it, but doing some reading, it appears that a dissolution (lawyers can help me out here) is a 'simple divorce' because both parties make the filing and it's basically a no-fault divorce.

So, here's the mystery, I've been told on one hand that if there stands an existing record of this on California divorce records, and if no one ever went back and pulled the paperwork when his parents reconciled a few months later... then his parents would/could have been divorced with no contest and have been living in sin for over 50 years... (and wouldn't the IRS figure this out?)

I laughed and told him to just send them to their Bishop. I'm sure enough "time has passed" he can quickly resolve it for them.