When Did Gard and Cornelia Get Married?

American Girl can’t keep its story straight on when Samantha’s Uncle Gard and Aunt Cornelia got married.

I can’t really explain why I care so much about this. It’s just maddening– perhaps because it ought to be so simple.

Let’s look at the facts.

In the original 6-book series, the wedding itself happens off-page. (Insane. Insane choice. Did you really think little girls wouldn’t want to see that??)

At the end of Samantha’s Surprise (1986), when the family is gathered around the Christmas tree, Samantha’s Uncle Gard presents his sweetheart, Cornelia Pitt, with a ring. Samantha asks when the wedding will be, and Gard and Cornelia respond in unison that it will be in March.

“When is the wedding?” Samantha couldn’t wait to find out.

“In March,” the couple answered together.

Clearly, these two have already made plans between themselves. This Christmas morning proposal was for the benefit of the family.

The next time we see these characters, in Happy Birthday, Samantha (1987), Gard and Cornelia are married. They’ve already returned from their honeymoon and live together.

Happy Birthday definitely takes place sometime in the spring. Several other sources give us a specific date for Samantha’s birthday: May 26.¹

This means the wedding must have taken place sometime between Christmas and May 26, which makes perfect sense, since we know the couple planned to wed in March.

In 1993, we finally see the wedding day in fiction. A short story called “A Most Exceptional Bridesmaid” by Valerie Tripp was published in American Girl Magazine. The story doesn’t give a specific date for the wedding, but it’s definitely winter weather.

“The day of the wedding was wintry gray and cold.”

“Sleet slashed at the windshield. Soon Samantha was being bounced and bumped as the automobile lurched along the icy, rutted roads.”

This matches the main series perfectly. Nobody seems caught off guard by the weather, but they wouldn’t be in March in New York. A wedding in March allows for planning time after the Christmas engagement and also leaves time for a honeymoon trip before Samantha’s birthday. This even matches the timeline in the Teacher’s Guide.

Perfect. What could be the problem?

The problem comes in the year 1998.

Around the time of the sale to Mattel, the Samantha books were given a refresh with new illustrations by Dan Andreasen. As usual, the covers were updated, but the text inside stayed the same. Mostly.

Inexplicably, copies of Samantha’s Surprise with this cover also include a modification to the text that ruins the established timeline. They say this:

“When is the wedding?” Samantha couldn’t wait to find out.

“In June,” the couple answered together.

…huh?

No other change was made at this time. The other pieces of the timeline are still in place. We can firmly say that the couple did not get married in June. The wedding still must happen before Samantha’s birthday, which is still May 26. The wedding date is still beset by winter weather. The only thing that’s changed is that Gard and Cornelia announce plans to get married later than they actually do.

Two years later, in 2000, the magazine short story was republished as a standalone mini hardcover book under the title “Samantha Saves the Wedding.” Like the other short stories, this story received new illustrations by Dan Andreasen as well as small text revisions. The revisions mostly seem focused on trimming down the word count and simplifying sentences, but they do offer the chance to change the content. If American Girl made the choice in 1998 to change the date of the wedding, you’d expect that change to be reflected in this new 2000 edition. But it isn’t!

The illustration of Gard and Samantha driving through sleet is gone, but additional references to the winter weather were added to the text.

“I’m not sure there’s enough time to get to Mount Bedford and back, especially in this icy weather.”

“There isn’t enough time to get to Mount Bedford and back.”

The day is still called “wintry gray and cold,” and nobody seems to find this out of the ordinary. The story hasn’t been updated to reflect a June wedding.

This has completely bamboozled me since I first noticed the discrepancy.

When I was compiling notes for my Samantha deep dive, the first copy of Surprise that I read included the June wedding date plan. Later, I encountered a copy with “March.” Oh, I said, this must be a later revision to reconcile the timeline. After all, Samantha’s Surprise was written first. Birthday and the wedding short story were written later, and by a different author. It’s not uncommon for small details like this to be lost in translation. Maybe someone realized that the June plans don’t match the later entries, so they edited Surprise to March to agree with the later work.

But that’s not what happened! The March line– the line that agrees with the rest of the timeline– is the original. The mismatched June line was a later revision.

This is an extremely bizarre situation to me. This is not a case where early books suggest one timeline but later books appear to contradict it. This is not a case where different authors seem to be working with different information. This is not even a case where an early edition includes an error that was corrected for later printings.

In this situation, everything is fine. The timeline works. All the stories agree. And then, for no clear reason, AG goes back and edits the text of one of the books. This edit directly contradicts the timeline in the rest of the canon materials.

Whyyyyyyyy?????

There’s no reason. There’s no reason to do this except to mess with me specifically.

Thankfully, it seems that someone at AG realized that this didn’t make any sense. In the 2010s, the text was revised again. This time, the couple doesn’t name a specific month, instead planning to marry “in the spring.”

The “in the spring” line persists in the single-volume hardcover collections as well as the BeForever versions of the Samantha stories.