Marriage Records

Learn how to locate and interpret marriage records to build your family tree accurately. These articles guide you through different record types across regions and explain what details reveal about your ancestors' lives.

Genealogy Searches and Pre-1538 Marriage Records

Finding any records in the pre-1538 world (when, under the Church of England, parish registers began) is a difficult, and often impossible task in genealogy....

Genealogy Source For Non-Anglican Marriages

The registers of many Nonconformist churches only recorded baptisms and burials, although a few did include marriages. However, when your family history sear...

Genealogy Sources For Non-Anglican Ancestors

According to the 1851 census, about 25% of the population didn't consider themselves to be Anglicans. Many of those were classed as Nonconformist, an umbrell...

Handfasting and Marriage

Over the years there has been a great deal of confusion regarding handfasting and marriage. It’s become a ceremony adopted as marriage by modern pagans, an...

How to Use Church Marriage Records to Trace Your Ancestors

After 1538 the Church of England was supposed to keep records of all baptisms, burials and marriages, although it wasn't until the end of the century that re...

Marriage Certificate Problems

You're hinting back for a particular marriage certificate that should be there, but it's not. After a few fruitless hours, things can become very frustrating...

Marriage Records: Scotland, Ireland, Channel Isles

Not everyone hails from England or Wales, of course, and even for those living there, their ancestors might well have been born and married elsewhere. Scotla...

New Zealand Marriage Records

In New Zealand, the registration of marriage first became compulsory in 1854 and you can find records from that time onwards in the Registrar General's Index...

The Problems With Common Law Marriage

These days it’s quite common for couples to live together. It’s something that’s become quite accepted as a practice, and rarely called by its proper n...

Using Marriage Certificates for Genealogy Research

Along with birth and death certificates, marriage certificates are the real meat and potatoes of genealogy research. One of the great joys of them is that th...

Were Fleet Marriages Taken as Legal?

Fleet marriages form a curious little anomaly in the history of marriage in England. They only happened in a few specific areas and then only really from 169...