Speaking of divorce...

On this day in 1643, the first record of a legal divorce in the American colonies was granted to Anne Clarke of the Massachusetts Bay Colony from her absent and adulterous husband, Denis Clarke, by the Quarter Court of Boston, Massachusetts. In a signed and sealed affadavit presented to John Winthrop Jr., the son of the colony's founder, Denis Clarke admitted to abandoning his wife, with whom he had two children, for another woman, with whom he had another two children.

That makes him the original American Deadbeat Dad.