The newest registries in archives, part II - marriage records

This post is the first one about the structure of the records - which information they contain, how the information is structured, why this information is included and so on. Let's start with the marriage records as those are quite often the starting points for the research.

Marriage records

I have already described the customs which were connected to marriage. As written there the marriage took place mostly in the parish where the bride was from. This is the place where you have to search for the marriage. The place is mostly written in the birth certificate as the place where mother's parents were from. There are some excemptions of course. The widower ofter married in his own parish, even if the bride was from another one.

First of all there is a date of marriage. It's often followed by the dates of triple banns which usually took place three Sundays before the marriage.

Then there is the house number. Later records have two of them - one for groom, another for bride. This number means the house where the groom / bride lived in when the marriage took place. If there is only one number shown, it's usually the one where the bride lived. There is sometimes also name of the village written next to the house number, but not always. 

Roman-catholic parish Babice nad Svitavou, birth registry 1888-1899, page 48 (MZA Brno) 

The information about the priest who married the couple is often written right under the date of marriage. Later registries have a column for the priest name, as well as his rank (chaplain, vicar, dean etc.).

Information about the groom follows. The structure quite often is: name and surname (or surname and name), occupation (or social status) in village name, legitimate son of father's name, father's occupation in village name, and mother's name and maiden name from village name. Here is an example from the image above: Antonín Havlíček, day labourer in Řícmanice, legitimate son of František Havlíček, house owner from Řícmanice, and Marie nee Šurelová.

Then there usualy are three columns (two of them doubled) - religion, age and status. Religion could be catholic or non-catholic (in catholic registries) and helvetian or augsburg (in protestant registries). Age is often shown only in years. You can find there exact date of birth from cca 1895. Status could be single or widowed.

The structure of the information about the bride is almost the same, only the occupation is excluded as it was not usual for a woman to have any occupation. The example above shows: Aloisie, legitimate daughter of Jan Cvilínek, owner of one quarter hide of land in Bukovina, and Anna nee Prachařová. The columns with religion, age and status follow.

The information about the witnesses is written down after the information about the bride. There are shown their names, occupation and place where they live. There were usually two witnesses, but it can happen that there were more of them (I have seen four as a maximum).

The record usually contains some more information - often about documents which were needed for the marriage - as confirmation about marriage banns from the parish where groom was from, information about the birth certificates which the couple had to bring in if they were from different parish. Agreement from the father was also included if the bride or groom were younger than 24 years of age.

There is quite a lot of information included in the records and thanks to it it's easier to track the family history. Well, at least in the 19th century... :o)