Hopefully, you will now have a copy of a marriage certificate that will take you through to the next generation and provide clues for an even earlier generation.

Step 1 – Marriage Certificates

What information does a marriage certificate give us?

1. Marriage date
2. Names of those married
3. Ages of those married
4. Condition – widow, single etc.
5. Occupation of those married
6. Addresses of those married
7. Names of both fathers
8. Occupation of both fathers
9. Witnesses

An example of a marriage certificate follows

Heading

This gives the place where the marriage was solemnised, usually the church or register office, and the registration district or parish, and the county. It is important to remember that the registration district will not always match the village or parish where the couple were living, especially in rural areas.

Directly beneath the details of the married couple you will be given more information about the religious denomination of the couple. For instance, Martino Marelli married Amy Plummer in 1891 at St George’s Catholic Church according to the rites of Roman Catholics. Some of their children have similar information but others have ‘according to the rites of the Established Church’ (the Church of England).

Entry Number

A church will have two identical registers and when they are complete one book is deposited with the superintendent registrar, but the other is kept by the church authorities and may finish up in the county record office or in the local church.

Some 500 entry registers are as yet incomplete and it is quite possible that the information has never been passed to a superintendent registrar who will therefore have no record of the marriages in a church in their district. The GRO however takes this type of information quarterly which is why you will often find a certificate via the GRO where you may have failed via your local registrar.

Column 1: Date Of Marriage

A marriage entry is dated on the day a marriage took place. There are various ways of recording the dates of marriages as I found with the following:

Column 2: Name And Surname Of Bride And Groom

It is important to remember that the name and surname of the bride and groom are not always as recorded on their birth certificates. Until later years they were not asked for proof of identity at the time of their marriage, simply the names they were known as. Therefore, they could use different Christian names as with Alice Amy Plummer who married using the name of Amy Plummer. Or in the case of Henry George Webber, who not only was known as George Henry on his marriage certificate, but also used the name of his stepfather rather than his birth-name. Some people were known by aliases for many different reasons and hid their true identities, others for bigamous reasons.

Column 3: Age At The Date Of Marriage

Again the couple were not asked to prove their age or identity, so these dates could vary enormously from the truth. Reasons might be that they were under age, the bride might be older than her husband, or maybe they had to guess their ages as they did not have copies of their birth records. Also, if a couple stated they were 21 years of age or over, they were not required to give their ages and if they were in fact under age and married without the consent of their legal guardian, the marriage itself could be classed as illegal.

I have a marriage record dated May 1 1879 with the ages of the couple simply recorded as ‘full’, and another as ‘both of full age’. Interestingly, I have one ancestor Asor Zoar who had children previously from a relationship in which she was unmarried, but went on to marry someone else in 1911 aged 28 years. However, she records her age as 33 years maybe because the man she married was 50 years of age, or for reasons we can only speculate.