5 Steps to Finding Marriage Records

by Lisa Cooke | Mar 29, 2023 | 01 What's New, Vital Records | 1 comment

Show Notes: Marriage records are essential to building your family tree. Here are the 5 steps you need to in order to find an ancestor’s marriage record.

Watch the Video

5 Steps to Finding Marriage Records for Genealogy

Downloadable ad-free Show Notes Marriage Records Worksheet for Premium Members.

A really good Spring cleaning task is to look through your family tree, starting with yourself and working backwards, and just checking to see if you have all the vital records for everyone. Vital records include birth, marriage and death records. Civil marriage records are typically some of the oldest vital records, and offer valuable information.

Step 1: Determine the time and place.

Time and place are critical to marriage record searches. Records like census records can help you get within 10 years of a marriage, and can also help you narrow in on the location of the wedding. Thankfully, all U.S. Federal Census records are free and online at FamilySearch.

Marriage records are typically filed at the county level. However, they can sometimes be found at the town level, particularly in New England.

It’s very important to identify the correct county at the time of the estimated marriage. You can do that using the Newberry Library’s Atlas of Historical County Boundaries. Click on the state and then select the time frame.

Atlas of historical county boundaries

Step 2: Use a genealogy guidance website

Genealogy “guidance” websites pull together information from a variety of sources to aid you in your research in a particular area. Here are two of my favorites:

The FamilySearch Wiki

Click on North America > United States > State. Scroll down the state page and click on the county. Use Alt + F to quickly search for the word marriage.

The wiki will likely also provide you with links and clues as to where to find the records. Remember, it’s not always a comprehensive list, but it’s a great place to start.

Learn more about the Wiki with these videos:

How to Navigate the FamilySearch Wiki (and find what you need!)
Dive Deeper into the FamilySearch Wiki (Genealogy Gems Premium Membership required)

Video and Show Notes

If civil marriage records had not yet started when your ancestors married, look for church marriage records. Learn more with my video: How to Use Church Records for Genealogy (Premium)

US GenWeb

All-volunteer website
Organized by state and then county.
Great place to tap into the collective brain trust of genealogists interested in the same area.
Provides information such as when records started, how to access them, or if they are no longer available.
Provides links to online records.

US GenWeb

Step 3: Genealogy Records Websites

If those leads don’t pan out, next turn to major genealogy websites. Start with the free FamilySearch, then if you have subscriptions to sites like Ancestry or MyHeritage, use those. (Note: These are affiliate links and we are compensated if you make a purhcase.) Only a fraction of these website’s record collections are included in their hints and suggestions. This means that the card catalog is essential if you want to scour all the records.

Learn more about searching Ancestry’s card catalog: Ancestry Top Tips and Hot Keys (Premium)

Video & Show Notes (Premium)

Step 4: Contact the jurisdiction that originally created the records

If you don’t get the record that way, you’ll need to do it the old-fashioned way: contact the county or town clerk.

Early vital records are often moved to the state level. That contact information can likely be found on the FamilySearch Wiki page you found, or you can Google:
County name, state “marriage records”

Check the following repositories:

State Library
State Archive
State Historical Society
County Historical Society
Other: _________________________________________

Step 5: Google Search

If all else fails, turn to Google to see if there are any other repositories or online resources outside of the largest genealogy websites and archives. Use search operators to focus your search.

Example: Randolph County Indiana “marriage records” 1880..1900

The quotation marks ensure that the exact phrase (Marriage records) is included on each web page result you get.

Two numbers separated by two periods is called a Numrange search. This instructs Google to also ensure that each web page result includes a number (in our case, a year) that falls within that range. It’s a great way to target marriage records from a particular time frame.

Learn more about marriage record research with these two instructional videos:

Marriage Records Case Study with J. Mark Lowe
Marriage Records and Gretna Green with J. Mark Lowe

Resources

Downloadable ad-free Show Notes Marriage Records Worksheet for Premium Members.

Get the Most out of Ancestry.com Shaky Leaf Hints

by Diahan Southard | Sep 16, 2014 | 01 What's New, Ancestry, Trees

If you’re an Ancestry.com user, you’ve seen those “shaky leaves.” They are automated hints generated when Ancestry.com thinks a historical record or tree matches an individual on yours.

Are you getting the most out of your Ancestry.com shaky leaf hints? Check out this video on YouTube–then keep reading!

In a nutshell: look at all the hints. Then keep searching.

According to the Ancestry Insider blogger, hints are only provided for the top 10% of Ancestry records.

I asked our Genealogy Gems source at Ancestry.com about this. He did clarify that this means the most popular 10% of collections, which accounts for “a majority of the records.” But he also comments, “Hints are not meant to be an exhaustive method to flesh out all of the records for your ancestors. People should always search as well as use hints.”

After checking all the hints, I routinely find a LOT more by then searching records from an individual’s profile.

Search from the profile rather than the main search screen so some of the other data you’ve already found (like dates and relationships and locations) will be included automatically in the search parameters. I think searching from the individual profile also makes it faster to attach records to your person once you’ve found them.

Click here to hear how one woman used Ancestry.com hints to discover a tree for the biological mother who abandoned her when she was five. You’ll also learn her inspiring message about how moving past her mother on her family tree has helped her move on with her life.

Gripping Firsthand Account of Pearl Harbor: Honoring WWII Ancestors

by Lisa Cooke | Dec 7, 2016 | 01 What's New, Book Club, Military

Landscape

The bombing of Pearl Harbor unfolds from the horrified notes in deck logs of ships in this short video narrative. Learn more about these and other resources for researching WWII ancestors at Pearl Harbor.

Today is the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and we pause to remember those who suffered in that attack. In honor of them, we share these unique resources for understanding what they went through that day.

Pearl Harbor Eyewitness Accounts

the National Archives (US) unfolds the terrifying action of the day from the point-of-view of sailors on ships at Pearl Harbor as they made ongoing entries in deck log books.

5 Ways to Learn about Pearl Harbor and Your WWII Ancestors There

Ship deck logs. According to this article in a National Archives magazine, deck logs of those ships docked at Pearl Harbor are part of the Records of the Bureau of Naval Personnel, Record Group 24, located at the College Park, Maryland facility in the Modern Military Branch. Click here to learn more about WWII-era deck logs at the National Archives, and here to learn more about naval deck logs and submarine deck logs in general.

National Archives guide. A new free guide can help you trace a person’s participation in World War II. The guide is “Finding Information on Personal Participation in World War II.” You’ll learn more about individual personnel files, military unit and ship records, merchant marine files, Army enlistment records, casualty records, and more.

Pearl Harbor casualty list. This free database lists all who died that day as a result of the attack. The dead and wounded included not only those who were on ships in the harbor, but civilians in Honolulu and military personnel in nearby locations.

National Archives programs. The National Archives is commemorating the 75th anniversary with programs and exhibits at the National Archives Museum in Washington, DC, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, NY, and the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum in College Station, TX. A series of book talks about Pearl Harbor’s history will be free and open to the public. We’ve listed the books below if you want to check them out.

Books. The authors of these acclaimed books are all speaking at The National Archives during the commemoration. Can’t get there to listen? Read them instead:

Countdown to Pearl Harbor: Twelve Days to the Attack by Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Steve Twomey. Looks closely at the “warnings, clues, and missteps” of the major characters and events leading up to the attack.
Pearl Harbor: from Infamy to Greatness by Craig Nelson. Learn how “the America we live in today was born, not on July 4, 1776, but on December 7, 1941.” He follows the actions of leading characters on both sides of the conflict as it unfolded.
Captain McCrea’s War: The World War II Memoir of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Naval Aide and USS Iowa’s First Commanding Officer by John L. McCrea and Julia C. Tobey. Amazing memories from the man who worked with President Roosevelt and commanded the USS Iowa.
Defenseless Under the Night: The Roosevelt Years and the Origins of Homeland Security by Matthew Dallek. The author traces the origins of the first U.S. office of homeland security.

One more book we must recommend: Chris Cleave’s stunning novel Everyone Brave is Forgiven. As you follow the stories of its unlikely heroes through their unlikely wartime romance, you’ll feel like you were there. You will feel your heart pumping while reading about the ducking attacks on the island of Malta or imaging yourself driving through bombed-out London neighborhoods as fighter planes droned above you. We featured this book recently in the Genealogy Gems Book Club; listen to an interview clip with the author in the free Genealogy Gems podcast episode 195.

Find more fantastic books that family historians {heart} with the Genealogy Gems Book Club. Click here to see what else we recommend.