At age 18, Fort left New York to embark on a world tour to "put some capital in the bank of experience". He travelled through the western United States, Scotland, and England, until becoming ill in Southern Africa. When he returned home, he was nursed by Anna Filing, whom he had known since childhood. They were married on October 26, 1896. Anna, four years older than Fort, was non-literary, a lover of movies and of parakeets. For a couple years, the newly-married couple lived in poverty in the Bronx while Fort tried to earning a living writing stories for newspapers and magazines. In 1906, he began to collect accounts of anomalies.