About the sealing — I personally find this practice misguided. Although sentimental and romantic on the surface, sealing someone to a person he or she was not married to is not the prerogative or privilege or responsibility of anyone, with the exception of the President of the Church who holds the keys to the sealing power.

Did Wilford Woodruff do the sealing of Irving and Hoffman in 1896? It’s possible — he was around, of course — but Irving was both famous and beloved, so practically anyone attending the temple could have had the sealing done. Both Irving and Hoffman were rebaptized at the same time in 1896, so I’d suspect it wasn’t Wilford Woodruff, but I don’t have access to the actual temple records to be able to see.

After 1896, the next spate of ordinances for Irving and Hoffman was in 1994. Their sealing was repeated three times that year. That was a striking data cluster, so I looked and saw that that was the year the book The Other Eminent Men of Wilford Woodruff was published.

(Now I better go read Irving’s Life of George Washington that has been sitting on my shelf for 20 years since I found it at a used book shop.)

The anguish that attended its catastrophe seemed to give a turn to my whole character, and throw some clouds into my disposition which have ever since hung about it.

I guess that’s why they call them “life-changing events.” One of the things I look forward to in the hereafter is learning a little about why these sort of events happen to us. (Really, why one or two have happened to me…)

They were first sealed in 1896. Matilda showed up in Family Tree (the newer version of NewFamilySearch) as “Mrs Washington Irving.” A descendant of Washington Irving’s sister has put a puzzled, lengthy note in Washington Irving’s entry with information about Washington and Matilda not being married. I wrote a similar but brief note for Matilda’s entry and have removed the “Mrs Washington Irving” bit from her list of alternate names.

And, bother, I should add the disclaimer here as I have done in the past that the Church policy is, and has been for many decades, to arrange the temple work for our own families, and for close friends with permission of their immediate families.

Washington Irving was probably the most beloved American author of the time. If all you’ve ever read of his is “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” — which was based, by the way on a line or two found in his History of New York by Diedrich Knickerbocker mentioned above — and “Rip Van Winkle,” you’re really missing out on some of the great tales of American literature. A very good collection is The Complete Tales of Washington Irving. It includes the curiosities and treasures of the early Dutch settlers of New York, the pure magic of the Alhambra tales, the story of the German student (a horror story I heard recycled during my youth without attribution to Irving) and many others. He was a masterful story-teller.

Irving was such an overwhelmingly influential figure in early American literature, due to both his stories and to the histories he wrote, and that made it hard to make this post mostly about Matilda, but the fact remains that she would have been barely remembered, just a name in the History of the Hoffman Family, if she and Washington Irving hadn’t fallen in love with each other.