How to find who your Ancestor married

Finding marriages in court house records is the most difficult task in genealogical research. The reason is that most counties did not require it until after 1900.

The old-fashioned way of getting married was to have a church (or home) wedding, presented by a minister or priest. After that, it was up to the minister to file it at the local court house. Sometimes, you find a published book on the shelf containing a marriage register kept by a minister. This is fine, but rare.

Another old-fashioned way of doing things was to add the Births, Marriages and Deaths to the family bible. For generations, this is how family records were preserved. Well, what happened to all of those old bibles? I have seen a few in antique shops. Once, while visiting such an establishment, I overheard the owner (who had just received one of those large bibles with the families listed therein) contemplating whether or not to contact the family. Turns out the bible had been owned by a well-known dairy farmer. Trends come and go, “the old” fades into “the new.” That is why I still wonder if the modern family had come for the bible.

In a similar manner, most of those old books written by genealogists in the 1930s have disappeared. That is because they were never re-printed. Oh, you might catch some that had been acquired by a library, but, for the most, no one bothered with a reprint. Incidentally, Genealogy-Books.com has acquired a large collection of digitized genealogy and history books for every State and are available…