As of March 2007 we are tracking information on just over 42,000 individuals. We also had record of just over 13,200 marriages. We have only a fraction of those marriages documented through physical copies of marriage records, so this will remain an on-going challenge.

The information on all the individual marriages we have on file are available through the links to the right. We have excluded from those lists any marriage record where we know the date of marriage to be after 1930 or where the date is unknown. So there will not be a direct correlation between those lists and the 13,200 marriages we are aware of today.

If we are looking for key personal events to help trace a person's life, the marriage certificates certainly deserve a place in that search. Just like birth and death records, marriage records mark a key point in genealogical research. Marriage records are key because they provide valuable information about family linkage, and if one is linking their DNA research to written records this is one of the key sources to help explain the empirical information.

The minimum information we should be able to glean from marriage records are the names of the parties being married, the date of the marriage, and the location. In many cases we might also find ages, of the parties and perhaps other family members who signed official documents with them.

All of these scraps of information provide valuable clues into the lives of our ancestors and can be used in conjunction with other information to validate one's life events.

Prior to the twentieth century, marriage certificates often were not required by municipalities. In those cases marriages were often recorded in official records, or nearly written down in family Bibles.

These two sources offer information similar to formal marriage certificates and should not be ignored. So where appropriate these records supplement the existing marriage certificates.