RLP 233: Marriage Bonds and Bondsmen

Nicole (0s):
This is Research Like A Pro. episode 233 Marriage Bonds Welcome to Research Like a Pro a genealogy podcast about taking your research to the next level. Hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited Genealogist professional Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team@familylocket.com and the authors of research Like a Pro, a Genealogist Guide with Robin Wirthlin. They also co-authored the Companion Volume research like a Pro with DNA, Join, Diana and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research and solve difficult cases.

Nicole (40s):
Let’s go. Hi everyone. Welcome to Research like a Pro.

Diana (47s):
Hi. Nicole. How are you today?

Nicole (49s):
Hi mom? I’m doing great. What, have you been working on or reading?

Diana (52s):
Well, I’ve been working my way through the NGS magazine and I am a couple issues behind. So this one was July to September, 2022, so not too far behind but it has had such good articles and the one I read today was on Locality Guides by Jan Joyce and Jan is one of our friends and colleagues and she runs the Proja study groups now. and I always love reading other people’s ideas about processes and locality guides and she had some really good thoughts in there. So it was just fun.

Nicole (1m 24s):
I loved getting those NGS magazines. I wish I read them more.

Diana (1m 28s):
Well I just have to do a little bit at a time, you know, my morning reading and that’s how I work through all of the different things that I’m always reading because it is hard to find a big chunk of time to sit down and and go through those things. But it’s amazing how much you can get down just by reading a little bit in the mornings. Right?

Nicole (1m 45s):
Yes, good for you. But not for, for me, I do not ever read in the morning because my mornings are filled with making lunches for children.

Diana (1m 54s):
I know and getting kids out the door. I’ve been there and I

Nicole (1m 58s):
Try to read in the evening sometimes and when I used to exercise and stretch I would read while I was stretching but I don’t know, I haven’t been exercising for the last couple weeks cuz we’ve been sick. I need to get back in the habit.

Diana (2m 9s):
Yeah, it’s like these little habits that really help. There’s that book Atomic Habits. I read that or listened to that I think a while ago. and I, it’s really interesting how when you tie a habit to something then you tend to do it more often and I I am totally on board with

Nicole (2m 27s):
That. Good tip Mom. I can do this.

Diana (2m 31s):
Yes you can. Well let’s do our announcements. We have our Research Like a Pro DNA Study Group beginning in February and when this is coming out there should still be a few spots left. It’s getting full so if you’re interested, be sure to register because the early bird sale does end December 31st and the peer group leader application is on our website. We still have a couple spots for peer group leaders if you’re interested. And then we have an exciting new announcement. We have a new Research Like a Pro Webinar series for 2023 beginning and this will be so fun. We’re going to have webinars once a month alternating between Tuesdays and Saturdays and they will be case studies for people who’ve used either DNA or just the Research Like a Pro process to make progress on a case.

Diana (3m 21s):
So I’ll be doing the first one on Saturday, January 21st and my title is was Rachel Cox, the daughter of Benjamin Cox, a DNA case study. So all of our listeners, you’ve probably heard me talk a bit about Rachel and Benjamin Cox, so I’ll be just showing you it all in a Webinar. So we’d love to have you join us. We have an introductory sale going until December 31st, so go check it out on our website. And also we are excited to announce as part of that we are looking for presenters who have used the research Like a Pro process either with or without DNA to work through a case. So we’d love to have you come and be part of our series if that is something you’re interested in.

Diana (4m 4s):
As always, join our newsletter for special deals and coupons and to keep up to date with what’s going on with us. And then also Roots Tech is open for Registration and coming up in two months and a week or two. So getting, getting closer and closer to Roots Tech. We’re excited about that and we hope to see a lot of you there.

Nicole (4m 25s):
Wonderful. Well today our listener spotlight is Amber and she gave us a great question on YouTube that prompted me to write a blog post and also prompted today’s topic. She said, can you please make a video speaking more about the bondsman and explain more of what it means. Also maybe provide some examples. So yes, the bondsman on a marriage bond is often very helpful for figuring out a person’s family because often they are relatives. So this was a great example and I’m excited to talk about it today.

Diana (4m 57s):
Well I’m excited to go through all your examples and just to discuss a little bit more about this whole idea of bondsman. I think the very first one that I used was when your dad wanted me to write up his case study on proving the father of Mary French as James French. He was not a bondsman on a marriage but he was a bondsman on her husband’s probate. And so, you know, that’s a similar type of thing, And. it just encouraged me to really start looking more at those because I think previous to that I had not paid as much attention. So I’m glad we’re going through this today and learning more about Marriage Bonds.

Nicole (5m 36s):
That’s a great point that you brought up about other types of Bondsmen. When I read the question I thought only of Marriage Bonds, but you’re right, there are other types of Bondsmen as well.

Diana (5m 46s):
Yeah, so I think that a lot of this could apply as well to probate. That’s the one that really comes to mind as another example.

Nicole (5m 54s):
Yeah, it would be interesting to go through this exercise of kind of looking at examples and seeing who the Bondsmen were on probate records too, right? Is it the administrator bond that we’re thinking of?

Diana (6m 6s):
Yes, yes. Because her husband, Mary French’s husband Ignatius Brian had died in test state. He was young and so he had left no will and they had to apply for letters of administration. And so the Bondsmen had to, you know, put up a certain amount of money or to say that they would pay this amount of money if they didn’t follow through with all the duties for administrators. you know, they had to do the inventory of the estate and they had to make sure everything was settled appropriately. And so the bondsman were James French who did turn out to be her father. And that was a key piece of evidence that the other one we discovered was a friend.

Diana (6m 45s):
I can’t remember exactly what his name was. And then the third one was an attorney and he, he was just involved in all sorts of cases there in the county, which so often happens, you know, you sometimes you just see the same person being a witness or a bondsman, you know, just kind of involved in a lot of things because they’re prominent in the community. You always have to research those people that are associated in these important details of a person’s life, like administrative, the estate.

Nicole (7m 14s):
I love that. And we have your Mary Ann French report on our website already as an example of a research report. So I will link to that in the show notes so that anyone who wants to can go read about that.

Diana (7m 25s):
Sounds great. Well why don’t you tell us a little bit about Marriage Bonds and exactly what that means and why we have them.

Nicole (7m 33s):
So I’m gonna start with some background information from Marriage Bonds in North Carolina. So in 1741, an act concerning marriages was created in North Carolina by the General Assembly in order to curtail unlawful marriages. There were a lot of marriages going on that were secret and people were not supposed to get married again and they maybe had already had a marriage and they left. So this law was hoping to try to govern the marriages a little more And. it required couples desiring to be married to obtain a license or publish the bands in church for three Sundays to obtain a license. The groom had to go and post a bond of 50 pounds with the condition that there is no lawful cause to obstruct the marriage for which the license shall be desired.

Nicole (8m 21s):
and I kind of learned all this from the book North Carolina research edited by Helen Leary in that section about Marriage Bonds in North Carolina research, it talks about how the penal sum on the bond was collected from the groom or Bondsmen only if the marriage was found to be illegal. And the bondsman was sometimes called asurity because he shared in the groom’s obligation. What was that money for? Well in the book North Carolina research, it talks about how the money was a protection for the future children of the marriage. So if the couple got married, had a few children, then later they found, found out the groom had already been married before and the marriage was illegal, then those children have some money to provide for them.

Nicole (9m 3s):
So Marriage Bonds were used in North Carolina until 1868 for most of this time they were the only record of the marriages until 1851 and a law that year required justices and ministers to return the licenses with certificates showing that they had performed the marriage. So you’ll see that sometimes in other localities that the licenses returned to the court with a sometimes like a note on the back even that says, I performed this marriage on such and such date. I was just looking at some of those from Louisiana in the 1830s and it’s so interesting to see them just writing on the back of the license.

Diana (9m 39s):
Yeah, that’s exactly right. Well that’s so interesting that they really didn’t have to even return the bond until 50 1851 when that was the law. I’m always interested in why these records were created and it’s also really interesting that it was to curtail unlawful marriages. So it really makes you wonder what was going on, you know that. What was the situation in the community, in the state, in the area? This was in North Carolina 18, 1741. It was a pretty young colony with lots of people immigrating. Interesting. Well let’s talk about the origin of Marriage Bonds.

Diana (10m 20s):
American colonists brought the practice of Marriage Bonds with them from England, which makes sense because we’ve seen this in our English research and dating back to the 14th century. The Church of England allowed couples to marry by license, but most couples married by bands. The public reading of bands in the church was done for three weeks asking if anyone knew a reason the couple shouldn’t marry and those seeking privacy for their marriage or wanting to hurry it up could obtain a license instead. But to marry by license, the couple were required to pay a fee and complete a marriage allegation in bond. And we’ve seen that a lot in our own family seeing mostly they were married by bands because they were very, very poor and some of our Ancestors never even got married because that must have been a time period where they had to pay to get a license.

Diana (11m 6s):
They couldn’t be married by bands. I’m not sure we’ll have to do more research. Do you know anything about that?

Nicole (11m 11s):
We had a a side of the family with a lot of illegitimacy and people not getting married and I wish I did know the reason, I just noticed that it ran in the family like Thomas Bradley’s mother gave birth to him out of wedlock and then she was born out of wedlock and sometimes the fathers were like the master of the household and the woman was like the servant. So I think it was just these poor servants, they were just used to illegitimacy and they didn’t have money, didn’t have planned or estates or homes really. They were like living in other people’s homes and and so that whole branch of the family, there’s like five illegitimate births.

Diana (11m 48s):
Right. I remember that. It always raises more questions when you see situations like that. Well in the American colonies, parish churches were not readily available before parish churches were set up and available to publish bans, many colonies required couples to marry by license. Some Bonds remain from the colonial period. Some like New York’s were mostly lost. New York Marriage Bonds from 1664 to 1911 were damaged in the fire at the New York State Library. But Kenneth Scott created a book of abstracts of the surviving Bonds called New York Marriage Bonds 1753 to 1783.

Diana (12m 28s):
So I have done some research in New York and that is really tough with so much damage to those marriage records, but

Nicole (12m 36s):
Fires are the

Diana (12m 37s):
Worst. They really are, which is what, what makes some of the New York cases so difficult. But I have not used Kenneth Scott’s book so I’d be curious to see, you know, what percentage they think were saved or you know, probably a small percentage, kind of like the 1890 census. We just have a tiny bit of census enumerations that were small saved. Yeah. Well and another colony that required Marriage Bonds was colonial Texas and that’s because that was under Spanish law. We’ll talk more about colonial Marriage Bonds and other ways to find colonial Marriage Bonds a little bit later. But several states continue to use Marriage Bonds after the colonial period and most mostly in the south.

Nicole (13m 21s):
Yes, mostly in the south. And my research is mostly in the south so that’s where I’ve seen them the most. But I do know that most of them are in the south and the states that are most commonly known for having a lot of Marriage Bonds are Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee. and they continued the use of Marriage Bonds for many years after statehood. I’ve also found some Marriage Bonds in Louisiana in the 18 hundreds and one commenter said she found Marriage Bonds in Texas and in Mississippi as well. And so if you do find some in your locality, that’s great. Sometimes you’ll find several different marriage records in a county and then sometimes you’ll only find that like one set of them remained.

Nicole (14m 3s):
But when all of them are extended, it’s fun because you have the marriage bond and the license and the certificate that was created by the person performing the marriage. And sometimes you’ll even have like a consent from a parent saying that their child isn’t told enough that they give their consent for them to be married. So sometimes you’ll find like four or five separate records that have to do with the marriage, but other times you’ll only find that one of them is extent or remains or has been digitized or something. So like in Louisiana, I was looking in in the 1830s in the Orleans Parish for the first and second justices, all that they had were these licenses. And then on the back the person who performed the marriage had written the certificate that they had done the marriage.

Nicole (14m 45s):
I wonder though if there was a bond that just didn’t survive.

Diana (14m 49s):
Well, I think there are probably a lot of records that didn’t survive. you know, if the bond was written on a piece of paper and given to the couple to take to the minister to perform the marriage, you know, that had to get saved or archived or recorded somewhere and probably a lot of

Nicole (15m 6s):
Those didn’t. So the bond usually was not taken with the couple that was the license. The bond was usually recorded by the county and kept there in case there was, you know, it was found to be an illegal marriage and that’s why a lot of Marriage Bonds remain because they were recorded by the county and saved

Diana (15m 23s):
In books. But I’ve seen some like especially in North Carolina or just loose pieces of paper and wondered about those, you know, why were those just written on a scrap of paper?

Nicole (15m 32s):
Yeah, the licenses are often on a scrap of paper cuz then they would take them with them to go get married.

Diana (15m 37s):
Right. Well and I think there probably was a standard way to do this but perhaps in a county if a county clerk didn’t have the book candy or it had run outta room, maybe they just improvised didn’t always follow the standard.

Nicole (15m 49s):
Yeah, And it changed over time and you know the laws, like I mentioned before, you know in North Carolina by 1851 they had created a law that required them to return the license and so then you have all of a sudden more records. Right? So back to where Marriage Bonds were used, there were Marriage Bonds outside of the US and outside of England in other British colonies and other European countries. So for example in Canada from 1779 to 1858 to obtain a civil license to be married, the crown required a bond entered into the bride groom with two charities, if not married by Anglican, a Roman Catholic church clergymen. So in the British colonies in Canada that’s what they had to do.

Nicole (16m 32s):
And then I was kind of just looking for more collections with the words Marriage Bonds in the family search catalog and I noticed almost all of the US results were from Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky or Tennessee. But then there were a lot from England created by the Church of England and also Canada, Wales and Ireland. Then there were some derivatives from other states that were labeled as Marriage Bonds, but sometimes these were actually just licenses that were mislabeled with the the wrong word. Anyways, I’d be curious for our listeners where you have seen Marriage Bonds in your research and share those in the comments, we’d love to hear about that. But I did learn that Marriage Bonds were usually filed with the brides county of residents.

Nicole (17m 12s):
So that can kind of help you determine where to look for the marriage records and the bond specifically the marriage usually took place a day or a few days after the date on the bond. Like we mentioned the certificate was not always returned after the marriage. So just because you find a marriage bond, it doesn’t necessarily mean the marriage took place. Some I think a very tiny percentage of marriage as mentioned on Marriage Bonds didn’t occur. Most of them did but every once in a while maybe somebody got cold feet and if that happened they didn’t have to pay the penal sum. The penal sum was only required to be paid if the marriage marriage happened but then was found to be illegal.

Diana (17m 52s):
Oh, okay. Well one thing I wanted to mention when you were talking about the states, you know, Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky or Tennessee, it makes sense that Kentucky and Tennessee would both carry on that tradition because they were originally part of the Virginia and North Carolina colonies, you know, that they would, they extended way west and then cut those off and became the new states of Kentucky and Tennessee. So it makes sense that those would continue with some of the, the same approaches to record keeping that the original colonies did of Virginia and North Carolina. So

Nicole (18m 24s):
Right and I think that there are some Marriage Bonds for counties that eventually became West Virginia for that same reason

Diana (18m 30s):
Probably. Yeah. Well let’s do some colonial examples and the first one is from Tyrell County North Carolina 1756 for a John Dwyer And it says John Dwyer and Jacob Blount bound themselves to pay 50 pounds to our sovereign Lord King George the second his heirs and successors on 29 May, 1756. And the obligation stated the conditions of this obligation that whereas a marriage is intended between John Dwyer and Jamina long, both of this county of Tyrell, a force head virgin woman. Now if there’s no lawful cause to obstruct the said marriage, then the above obligation to be void.

Diana (19m 12s):
That’s a fun example and it’s always fun to transcribe these and then just read the wording and see what they’re saying. So

Nicole (19m 21s):
Yeah, and these Marriage Bonds, they had sometimes descriptions of the women like this one you get to find out that she’s an unmarried or a virgin woman and then sometimes it’ll say she’s a widow or you know, has already been married or

Diana (19m 35s):
That’s very helpful.

Nicole (19m 36s):
There was another locality I was looking in where sometimes it will say Mrs So-and-so and then that makes you wonder, does that mean she was married? But I think it, this was in the book North Carolina research, it said that even if it says Mrs, that doesn’t always mean that she was previously married because sometimes in the early days of the colony they would use Mrs to indicate that somebody was of a higher class or more wealthy.

Diana (20m 2s):
So kind of status that is a really good insight into that. Well let’s look at another one. This one’s from Pennsylvania, which we have not mentioned. Pennsylvania being, you know, a place that had Marriage Bonds. I’m just wondering if they, you could perhaps find them in just about any state. It’d be fun to know that.

Nicole (20m 20s):
Well in the colonial period I think they did a lot of them. So probably most of the colonies like New Jersey had some, like we mentioned New York right before statehood, I believe most of the colonies did have them.

Diana (20m 32s):
So this one’s for Joshua Ferrell 1785 and even though it was after the revolution, I mean it was just the, that transition era between colonial and statehood. And it’s a good example of the colonial era Bonds and the the bond obligation is interesting. It says the condition of the obligation is such that if there shall not hereafter appear any lawful let or impediment by reason of any pre-contract consanguinity affinity or any other just cause whatsoever. But that the above mentioned Joshua Ferrell and Maryanne McCartney may lawfully marry and that there is not any suit depending before any judge for or concerning any such precontract.

Diana (21m 15s):
And also if the said parties in each of them are of the full age of 21 years and not are not under the tuition of his or her parents or have the full consent of his or her parents or guardians respectively to the said marriage. And if they or either of them are not indented servants and do and shall save harmless and keep indemnified the above mentioned John Dickinson Esquire and shall likewise save harmless and keep indemnified the clergyman minister or person who shall join the said parties in matrimony for by reason of his so doing this obligation to be void and if none effect or else to stand in full force and virtue, oh my goodness, that one had a lot packed in there didn’t it?

Nicole (21m 56s):
Right. and I love that it mentioned all the different reasons why the marriage might be illegal. We’ve already contracted a marriage pre-contract consanguinity and Affinity, like if they’re too closely related,

Diana (22m 8s):
If they’re not the full age of 21 years

Nicole (22m 11s):
And if they aren’t they can get consent from the parents.

Diana (22m 14s):
Right. And this probably is a standard I, I’d be interested to compare this marriage bond with others in Pennsylvania or in this specific area and see if this was just the boiler plate language.

Nicole (22m 29s):
It was, yeah you can see in the blog post that there was a pre-printed form for this one and they just filled in the spots that were like their names basically,

Diana (22m 38s):
Which would make it much easier for those who are keeping the records.

Nicole (22m 42s):
Yeah. and they used the long S and so it was kind of tricky to transcribe it cuz they keep wanting to type. I kept wanting to type F instead of S.

Diana (22m 51s):
Yeah

Nicole (22m 52s):
Because it looks so much like an F in the block script.

Diana (22m 56s):
Right.

Nicole (22m 57s):
Well let’s look at some examples in the United States. So I’ve come across a bunch of Marriage Bonds for my Ancestors in research subjects in Virginia and Tennessee. First one I have is an example for my husband’s fourth great grandparents, Louis Tharp and Joanna West. And this was from FA year county Virginia in 1805. So the only record that remains of their marriage is the bond and that includes the consent of Joanna’s father. And since she was not yet 21, her father John West provided his written permission. And that’s included with the record And. it also says that the bondsman with Louis Thorpe was named William West. And for my research I’ve determined this was almost certainly the brother of Joanna West, Louis Thorpe, Joanna West, Joanna’s father John West and William West all migrated to Hawkins County, Tennessee.

Nicole (23m 47s):
And I’ve traced them there. So it’s interesting to see that the bondsman was a relative of the bride, her brother. And we’ll find that that’s pretty common to have it be a relative of the bride

Diana (23m 58s):
And I think that just speaks to the point of becoming familiar with a lot of different records because the more you look at these and you research the people involved, the more understanding you’ll have. When you look at a record and you don’t know the people involved, they’ll give you ideas. Okay these could be related to the bride and you won’t just discount them. Absolutely.

Nicole (24m 21s):
Another bond I came across when researching the West family in FA year county Virginia was from 1801 And. it was a marriage between George Thorpe and Polly Noland. And so this was dated January 12th, 1801 and John West was the bondsman. I determined there were two connections between George Thorpe and the bondsman John West. First John West was the uncle of Polly Noland. So Polly’s mother Jemima Noland provided her permission for Polly to marry George Thorpe. And so that was included with the bond because she wasn’t 21. And as I put the family together and researched them all, I figured out that Jemima Noland, her maiden name was Arnold and she was the sister of Bathsheba Arnold who was the wife of John West.

Nicole (25m 10s):
So John West’s wife was the aunt of Polly Nolan. So he was the uncle and Jemima was widowed by the time Polly was married, which is probably why the uncle John West was asked to be the bondsman instead of Polly Nolan’s own father.

Diana (25m 25s):
You had to do a lot of research figuring out all these different people.

Nicole (25m 28s):
That one kind of fell into my lap because other people had kind of put these things together and I found it. you know, it wasn’t all my own research, but the second connection between John West, the bondsman on George Tharpe and Paul Nolan’s marriage bond is that John West was probably the employer of George Tharp. we don know for sure, but John West paid personal property taxes for George Tharp in 1799 and 1800. Well he paid the poll tax for him And, it was listed on the personal property tax returns in those two years. It lists the person paying taxes as John West and then a person who’s like in his household who’s paying taxes for who’s over 16, it lists George Thorpe So.

Nicole (26m 14s):
we just thought this maybe meant that he was an apprentice or an employee of John West. and I found a chancery record that said John West was a millwright, but George Thorpe and some of John West’s sons became Stone Masons So. we thought maybe he was also doing that.

Diana (26m 34s):
Interesting.

Nicole (26m 34s):
But if you see that on a tax record, men who employed others were usually responsible for paying the taxes of those servants or apprentices. Anyway, I thought that was interesting that there were, were two connections and probably the main one was the fact that John West was the uncle of Paul Nolan and that’s why he was the bondsman. I think usually they were looking for someone related to the bride. Well

Diana (26m 54s):
I think they were just a community of people, you know, these were a few families that did everything together and they are the ones that were Bondsmen who were witnesses who married each other. you know, we just don’t live in a time where that is so important. you know, this idea of just a few families all being very connected. So it’s hard for us I think sometimes too, imagine that. But that’s what it was like when they’re out on the frontier. I mean this is 1801 in Virginia in FA County and you know, he even knows how large this community was. So always good to seek out the connections.

Nicole (27m 30s):
All right. Okay, here’s my last example from Faulk County Virginia. So this is John West, his second marriage after Shiba Arnold died, he dug out a marriage bond to Mary Sally Webb in 1805 and the bondsman was Richard Webb. So the surname is the same as the the bride. And from what I’ve found, the bondsman Richard Webb was likely the bride Sally’s brother. So there we go. Another relation to the bride. In my current research project, I’ve been looking for clues about John West’s origins. And so I was really looking hard at this marriage bond because there was no marriage record of his first marriage to Shiba Arnold. and I was looking at this and noticing every single name on the marriage bond.

Nicole (28m 12s):
and I noticed that the witness to the marriage bond was Daniel Withers. And that set off alarm bells because I had seen a marriage between Sally Withers and a Charles West and I thought maybe the withers connection was showing that our John West could be related to Charles West. But when I checked more into Daniel Withers, I found he was a clerk of the county court and he was a witness on several other Bonds and I think I’ve mentioned this before. So I decided that that was not a associate of John West, it was just a witness. So I later learned, I think this was in North Carolina research, that book that the witness on the Marriage Bonds was usually the clerk.

Diana (28m 51s):
Oh, interesting. Well that makes sense.

Nicole (28m 54s):
You know when you’re looking at a will, often the witness is an a close family associate. Yeah. But apparently on a marriage bond it’s not the same

Diana (29m 0s):
Because your associates are the Bondsmen.

Nicole (29m 3s):
Right.

Diana (29m 5s):
A little bit different scenario.

Nicole (29m 8s):
All right. So another example is from North Carolina and this was from a client project to discover the origins of John Johnson of Rowan County, North Carolina. And so here’s an excerpt from the report. Mary Polly Davis and her husband Benjamin Davis were petitioners in the probate file of John Johnson in 1825. In their petition they stated that they were married in Roanne County marriage records were searched and a bond was located for Benjamin Davis and Mary Johnston dated 24 October, 1800 with Randolph Johnston, the bondsman. So that was really helpful for me because I had already found that Randolph Johnson was the son of John Johnson and he appeared with his father John Johnson in the will the probate records, the tax records and nearby and a census records.

Nicole (29m 55s):
So I kind of had used the name Randolph Johnson as the associate to help me figure out which John Johnson was, which because there were a lot. So seeing his name as the bondsman on this marriage of Benjamin Davis and Mary Johnson helped me know for sure that this was the right family and submitted the fact that this was the correct Mary Johnson who was intending to marry Benjamin Davis and that she was the sister of Randolph. So once again, the bondsman is the brother of the bride.

Diana (30m 21s):
Okay. And how nice that he had a little bit more unusual name than John Johnson. Yes, as in Randolph, I have not seen very many Randolph’s.

Nicole (30m 29s):
Yes, it was helpful. And that name also showed up in the perspective father of John Johnson’s family as a brother to John Johnson. So that helped to use thetic evidence that way.

Diana (30m 40s):
Nice.

Nicole (30m 41s):
Okay. So we’ve done several in Virginia, one in North Carolina. Our next example is from Kentucky and this is from 1808, A marriage bond between John Beasley and intended marriage two Sena Doherty. And in this example I was trying to find a connection between a cluster of DNA matches and my husband’s third great-grandfather John Robert Dyer and the common Ancestors of this cluster were a group of dower and Taylors who had migrated from Craven County North Carolina to Warren County Kentucky. and I had found several D N A matches descending from Robert Daugherty and Sarah Taylor. So I worked on finding all of their children and really proving these were the children of Robert Daugherty and Sarah.

Nicole (31m 23s):
And in that process I found a marriage bond for one of their daughters, Cena Doherty. And she married John Beasley in 1808 and the bondsman was Robert Daugherty, almost certainly Cena’s father. And so once again, the bride’s relative was the bondsman. And to understand the Marriage Bonds I was finding for the Doherty children in Warren and Butler counties, I did some research into the laws of Kentucky. and I found this whole paragraph in the statute law of Kentucky that talked about the process And. it talked about how every license for a marriage shall be issued by the clerk of the court to that county were in the fem usually a resides in the manner following that it is to say the clerk shall take bond with good surety for the sum of 50 pounds of current money payable to the governor for the time being and his successors for the use of the commonwealth with condition that there is no lawful cause to obstruct the marriage for which the license shall be desired.

Nicole (32m 20s):
And every clerk failing herein shall forfeit and pay 50 pounds current money. And if either of the parties intended to marry shall be under the age of 21 years and not there to form married, the consent of the father or guardian of such infant shall be personally given before the said clerk or certified under the hand and seal of such father or guardian, guardian attested by two witnesses and thereon the clerk shall issue a license and certify that bond is given. And if the parties or either of them be under the age of for said he shall also certify the consent of the father or guardian and the manner thereof to any minister legally authorized to celebrate the rights of matrimony and every license so obtained and signed and no other whatsoever is hereby declared to be a lawful license.

Diana (33m 5s):
So did I read that right? That that the clerk would have to pay the 50 pounds if they fail in their duties?

Nicole (33m 12s):
If the clerk failed in his duties?

Diana (33m 13s):
Right. If the clerk failed in his duties, he’d have to pay. That’s

Nicole (33m 16s):
Funny. Yeah. So it’s just kind of saying like you clerks you have to do this process or else you’re gonna be also

Diana (33m 22s):
You have to pay a fine.

Nicole (33m 24s):
Yeah,

Diana (33m 24s):
That’s

Nicole (33m 25s):
Funny. Yes. And so that was helpful, you know for me and I put that in my research report on Robert Daugherty and his children because there were Marriage Bonds for each of the children. And. it was helpful just to know the process. It is. I also found that Robert Daugherty himself was a minister who was performing some of the marriages. So that was also fun.

Diana (33m 43s):
Yeah, there’s a lot of good information in that law. So good job on finding that marriage statute from Kentucky.

Nicole (33m 51s):
I think I found it in Google books. Hmm. So the only state we haven’t had an example from yet is Tennessee. So our last example is from Tennessee And, it’s a bit later, it’s in 1849 And it. The marriage bond was for Augustus Dyer who was intending to marry Lucinda Woods. And this was November 7th, 1849 and the bondsman was William Thorpe. So this one was interesting And, it was different because the connection between Augustus Dyer and Lucinda Woods to the bondsman was actually through the groom, not the bride. and I had found that Augusta Dyer’s mother, her name was Bathsheba Thorpe and her brother was William Thorpe.

Nicole (34m 34s):
So this was the groom’s maternal uncle

Diana (34m 37s):
So. we are seeing this pattern of the bondsman typically being relatives of the bride. And so your different examples were bride’s father, bride’s uncle and groom’s employer, bride’s brother, groom’s uncle, bride’s brother-in-law.

Nicole (34m 53s):
Yeah. That last one is an example that I’m gonna share in the next part of the series when we do our next podcast episode, we’ll talk about it. But most of the Bondsmen are relatives of the wife.

Diana (35m 4s):
It just speaks to the importance of researching these people and figuring out the connection. and I like the point that you make in the article that if the surnames of the bride and the Bondsmen don’t match, you need to research because you might be looking for an uncle or a brother-in-law connection because people get married and change surnames. And then another possibility accounting for that different surname is that the woman may have been married before and so maybe you’re getting a clue to her true maiden name, not her, you know, marriage from her first husband or second husband.

Nicole (35m 36s):
Right. And even, even sometimes I’ve seen Bonds where the bride’s first husband’s family are the Bondsmen. Yeah. Like her brother-in-law from her first marriage or father-in-law.

Diana (35m 47s):
Right. So one of the questions that came after doing this research was from a reader from the S blog post who wondered how old a man had to be in order to be a bondsman, which is a really good question. And the answer has to do with common law. And so the American colonies generally followed British common law and the other kind of law, it would be the civil law that was followed in those with Spanish roots such as Louisiana or French roots in Louisiana or Texas with the Spanish law roots. So the British common law states how this all works and so you can learn more about common law and what it allowed for infants under age 21.

Diana (36m 32s):
And William Blackstone’s commentaries stated that an infant can neither align his lands nor do any legal act nor make a deed, nor indeed any manner of contract that will bind him. So they had to be 21 after that. Blackstone listed some exceptions, but none allowed a man younger than 21 to be a bondsman. And the only contracts an infant could make were binding himself as an apprentice and appointing his guardian. So you know, we generally do think of that age of 21 as being the age that perhaps they started paying taxes or were able to purchase land and have a deed in their own name, witness a will, you know, so it would, it makes sense that that would be the age to be a bondsman, that they’d have to be 21.

Diana (37m 22s):
Yeah.

Nicole (37m 23s):
Under common law there was also another age that was important and that was the age of discretion and that was usually at age 14. And so there’s some things they could do at age 14, like they could witness things at age 14, but actually selling land or being a bondsman, like binding themself into contracts other than apprenticeship or appointing a guardian, they had to be 21 or older. They couldn’t be an infant. Which is funny, you know, like thinking of the word infant, applying to anyone under 21 now is kind of funny. But that’s how it was used in British common law. Right.

Diana (37m 56s):
Was good to know the terminology at the time.

Nicole (37m 59s):
Yeah. And there’s a Really great summary of what was kind of allowed for different ages under common law. At the website Bob’s Genealogy filing cabinet and he has this whole like summary of legal age and he lists out actions only adults could perform. you know, once you’ve reach reached full majority the age of 21, you could buy and sell land without restriction, vote and hold public office patent land, devise land in a will, execute a bond or a promissory note and then actions that only minors could perform. When you’re 14 and over, you’ve reached the age of discretion. At least you can choose a guardian guardian or place a guardian apprentice yourself without per parental consent.

Nicole (38m 40s):
Bequeath personal property but not real property in a will witness deeds and contracts and testify in court. So these ages are so helpful for estimating ages of a person because if you know that they had to be age 21 on this date, then you can say they were born before such and such year And it. It’s really helpful for that research in the colonies in the early times when you don’t have a lot of other record of their age.

Diana (39m 6s):
This is a great website. I’m going to bookmark this one. Bob’s Genealogy Filing Cabinet on Legal Age. It’s just so nice to have it all spelled out because you know, quite frankly you learn about this, you read about it, but then if you’re not continually using it, you forget all the little details and specifics for each age. So this is great.

Nicole (39m 25s):
Yeah, the URL to that is gen files.com/article/legal age. So we’ll put that in the show notes. It’s in the article too. All right. Next we’ll talk about how to find Marriage Bonds and my preferred method is going to the family search catalog. I will go look for certain locality that I think the couple was married in. So I’ll put in like Warren County Kentucky into the family search catalog place field. And then I’ll go to the different collections for that county and look under the vital records subject. And then you’ll see a list of like births, marriages and deaths. And you can just look for the Marriage Bonds and a lot of those are digitized for North Carolina though I would start with the database index at Ancestry or at family search, either one.

Nicole (40m 12s):
The Ancestry one is great because it actually allows you to search using the Bonds man’s name. And so if you are wanting to find any record where your ancestor or research subject was a bondsman, you can use that index. The problem with that index is that it’s not attached to the original images. So then once you find the index record you can go over to family search because the family search database is attached to the original images that have been digitized. So that’s how I would do it for North Carolina. And then for any Marriage Bonds that occurred in the colonies like in Pennsylvania or New Jersey or other colonies, you can just go to the family search catalog and do the place search.

Nicole (40m 53s):
And you can also check for indexes or images on state archives websites. There’s one on the New Jersey Archives website. Also you can check books of local record abstracts. And this is a great way to find bondsman too because they’re not always included in indexed online databases. So it’s harder to find if your ancestor was a bondsman for someone else’s marriage. But if you are going to like the Family history library in Salt Lake City, you can go to the shelves for your county and then find any books of abstracts for Marriage Bonds. And this applies to any other type of abstracts you’re looking up and just look in the index to see if your person is mentioned in the book.

Nicole (41m 33s):
And sometimes you’ll find that your person was a witness to a deed or they were a bondsman to someone else’s marriage. So those abstracts are really helpful because they are indexed and usually include more than just the subjects of the event.

Diana (41m 48s):
Great. Well I am just looking at the North Carolina indexed to Marriage, Bonds and I found our John Eisenhower and Sarah Bailey who’s our ancestor. And I’m looking at the bondsman, George Snyder and wondering who in the world is George Snyder?

Nicole (42m 3s):
I’m guessing that he’s an uncle to the bride. That’s

Diana (42m 6s):
My guess. Now I’m gonna have to go research Sarah Bailey and see how George is connected. Yeah,

Nicole (42m 10s):
I’m curious now too. It’s really interesting because a lot of the time those generations further back are harder to piece together. And so every piece of evidence like that is so helpful.

Diana (42m 20s):
Right. Fun. That’s a great index. The one on Ancestry and I do love how they have index the Bondsmen and the witnesses. It’s nice.

Nicole (42m 29s):
Yeah, that’s kind of unique. On the New Jersey Department of State website, they have a a database called Colonial Marriage Bonds 1665 to 1799. And this is searchable. You can type in names And, it includes early Marriage Bonds that are held at the state archives there. It actually includes 11,533 Bonds and 20 3066 names And. it indexes the names of the bride and the groom and they counties of residents and the date on which the bond was filed and sometimes parental consent was required.

Nicole (43m 9s):
So these can be really useful, but the parental consent isn’t included in the database, so you have to order the records from them. So if you want to order the records, you have to click select and then add it to your cart and then you can order the original image. And another example of a database that you can search is from England on Ancestry. There’s the Somerset England marriage registers Bonds and Allegations from 1754 to 1914. And this is an example of before the colonies, you know, back in England what were the Marriage, Bonds and allegations like. So you can go look at those by searching through this database on Ancestry.

Diana (43m 48s):
Well I think that the major websites are working hard to get those records digitizes and available to us because they are so important. and I hope that everybody has gotten some good insights. Hopefully you can go look at your records and maybe you’ve just skipped over the part that there was a bondsman and not even thought to research them. So it’s always fun to discover new avenues for research and how we can make more connections in our Ancestors communities.

Nicole (44m 16s):
Absolutely, and I’m excited because in our next podcast episode we’ll talk all about how the discovery of who the bondsman was really opened up some fascinating research connections for the bride Oh.

Diana (44m 27s):
Great. Well we hope everyone has a great week and we’ll talk to to you next time. Bye-bye.

Nicole (44m 33s):
Bye. Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our books, research Like, a Pro, and Research like a Pro with DNA on amazon.com and other book sellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at family lock.com/services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday. Subscribe to our newsletter@familylock.com slash newsletter. Please Subscribe rate and review our podcast. We read each of you and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to research Like a Pro.