RLP 274: Church Marriage Records

Nicole (0s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 274 Church Marriage Records. 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 at family Locket dot 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 D n A, 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 the sponsor of today’s episode of Research Like a Pro is newspapers.com, the largest online newspaper archive. Hi everyone and welcome to the Research Like a Pro podcast,

Diana (53s):
Hi Nicole. how are you today?

Nicole (55s):
I’m good. I’ve been sending a lot of messages on ancestry requesting access to cousin’s d n a matches.

Diana (1m 4s):
Well that’s fun. I hope you get some responses.

Nicole (1m 7s):
Yeah, me too. I tried to focus on the, the closest generationally to the research subject and this is actually a project that Lance’s aunt has been working on her whole life and she contacted me yesterday, she’s in North Carolina doing some onsite research looking for headstones and she found some D N A matches that point to a hypothesis and she wanted me to review it and see if they were actually good evidence for her hypothesis. so I looked at the through lines and there were several matches descending from each child of the hypothesized couple. But as I reviewed them, most of them were from the wrong parent side.

Nicole (1m 48s):
And you know how ancestry groups matches to parent one and parent two, while the research question she had was on parent two’s side, which was her mother, but most of the matches in the through lines were for parent one. So there were only like four that weren’t. And as I looked at each of those four matches, they actually were in clusters that belonged to different ancestral couples. so I told her that the hypothesis was probably wrong, at least the d n a evidence that was in that through line. ’cause she added the hypothesized parents to her tree and that’s how she got the through lines for it. But I think this couple just had a lot of descendants. And so with so many people in the D N A match list, it’s not very hard for through lines to find people who have that couple in their tree.

Diana (2m 30s):
That is so fascinating and I love that we have that new feature of parent side because that really helps us to analyze the through line so much better. That’s great.

Nicole (2m 42s):
Yeah, it was a little bit discouraging I’m sure, but at the same time it’s great to be able to know those matches are not relevant to that Ancestor, right?

Diana (2m 52s):
You just have to understand how to correctly analyze those through lines, which can be kind of tricky. Well, I have been reading more in my book by Richard l Bushman, it’s titled The American Farmer in the 18th Century of Social and Cultural History. And I’ve just been loving reading, he bases this on a lot of letters and diaries. So those original sources that people wrote or recording their day-to-day life on the farm. But he draws such great conclusions and puts into the context of the historical time. So I’ve been getting a lot of insights into our farmer Ancestors and one of the chief things that I have learned was that they were part of the community in that they would barter and sell their goods back and forth, but then they were also what he calls the subsistence farming.

Diana (3m 48s):
So they were trying to produce everything they could to use on their own farm. And we see this in the textless, you know, we’ll see that they are producing eggs and butter and they’ve got cows and sheep and they’re growing wheat and barley and sweet potatoes. You know, they’re just doing everything they can to, to furnish what they need for their families themselves. But then what they can’t do, like maybe they can’t grow cane, you know, and so they have to purchase some sugar so then they do some trading or purchasing out in the community as well. So that’s been really fascinating taking that and putting it together with my knowledge of what they were actually producing on the farm from those tax list.

Nicole (4m 29s):
What a good insight into American farmers, which most of our Ancestors were.

Diana (4m 34s):
Absolutely. Well, let’s do some announcements. We have our Airtable quick reference guide available for P D F download from our website. And this gives you all the details that you need to know if you would really love to get started with using Airtable for your Genealogy research. And we have another Research Like, a Pro Webinar series coming up on October 17th. And this will be presented by Rick Wilson. And the title is A Father for William Boyd, A case study using 18th Century Indirect Evidence, which will be fascinating. And Rick was in one of our research Psycho Pro study groups and I’m excited to hear that case study.

Diana (5m 15s):
We have our next research psycho Pro d n A study group beginning in February, 2024. So be thinking if you would like to commit to that and really get started with using D N A for your research. And if you’d like to be a peer group leader, the application is on our website and you get complimentary registration if you do that and get to work with your small group of peers as you all go through the process together. And please join our newsletter for all of our latest news blog posts, Podcasts, and also any special coupons that we might have. We are excited for the next conference coming up. And this is the Professional Management Conference by the Association of Professional Genealogists.

Diana (6m 1s):
And this will be virtual and in person in Salt Lake City. It’s October 19th, the 21st and Nicole is joining me here in Utah. And we’ll be presenting together and we are have titled that Talk How to Incorporate Multiple Income Streams to Increase your Company’s Revenue, which should be really fun. And then I will be doing a livestream lecture called Creating User-Friendly Client Reports that incorporate D n A analysis. So we are excited to be in person together and to meet a lot of our Genealogy professional friends and just have an in-person conference. It will be so great.

Nicole (6m 42s):
Yeah, I need to see if I can book another flight to Utah with me. I have this Companion pass on Southwest and try to decide if I should bring one of my kids or somebody. I mean, I got a free ticket so

Diana (6m 57s):
Well you, there you go. You can bring one of the children and they can keep Grandpa company while while we’re gone.

Nicole (7m 6s):
It will be fun to be together and we always just have such a good time going to conferences together. It’s kind of like our girl time, you know, we can get our nails done and then we can

Diana (7m 14s):
Go

Nicole (7m 15s):
To the conference.

Diana (7m 18s):
There you go.

Nicole (7m 19s):
All right. Well for our listener spotlight, we have a quick review from Sheie Feinstein. It was on the Research Like a Pro episode 267 about Daniel Henry and the Mormon Battalion, who’s my Ancestor through my dad. And she just said great stories about a neighbor’s Ancestor. Thanks. So that’s fun. Daniel Henry had a lot of descendants in it’s fun that he’s an Ancestor of one of our listeners’ neighbors.

Diana (7m 42s):
Yeah, we have run into that case where somebody’s talking about their Ancestor and it’s one of the Henry’s we’re like, oh, that’s our Ancestor too. So they had a lot of descendants.

Nicole (7m 53s):
Yeah, so many descendants likely due to the polygamy.

Diana (7m 56s):
Yeah, and just having a lot of children too.

Nicole (8m 1s):
Today we’re talking about marriage records and this is part of our series on marriage records. And this part focuses on Church Marriage Records. So Church Marriage Records are a pretty common record set in Genealogy research for many European countries. And Church Marriage Records can also be found in US research depending on the time period in the state. And you may find Church of England parish marriage records in Colonial Virginia. You may find Catholic church marriages all over the country, Lutheran church marriages, especially in German populations and so forth. Determining the religion of your Ancestors can really help you determine which church they may have been married. In civil marriage records often have a clue for you, and that would be the name of the person who performed the marriage, and that can also lead you to determine where they were married.

Nicole (8m 50s):
Sometimes the church marriage record will reveal more information than the civil marriage record, and so it’s worthwhile to seek that out if you can. Sometimes the church marriage record will name the parents and the place of origin could name witnesses who could be part of the fan club. So if you can figure out where they were married, you may want to look into that church’s marriage records to see if they have kept those.

Diana (9m 15s):
We reached out to our team of researchers at Family Locket to give us some examples of how Church Marriage Records have helped in their projects. And Alice Child shared her experience using Church Marriage Records in Poland. She said, when I worked on the country project, the Polish Church Marriage Records were very helpful in extending Michael C’s line. The records named the bride and groom’s parents, and usually the father of each parent earlier Polish Church records can be access free online. And the ones Alice used were at the Preez Missile Archives. I’ll spell that ’cause I have no idea how to say it. P R Z E M Y S L.

Diana (9m 56s):
And Alice also wrote a blog post about Polish records that include step-by-step instructions for accessing the church records. so I think it’s really great that more and more these records are being put online. You know, it used to be back in the day you had to go to Poland or hire a Polish researcher to go and find those records and how wonderful that we are getting more of these records. And actually Alice wrote that she did end up hiring a researcher in Poland to retrieve more recent records that have to be obtained in person. So very interesting that some of the more historical ones were available online but had to go in person.

Diana (10m 38s):
And it’s just all part of learning locality, learning where these records are held, what’s available, how to access them.

Nicole (10m 45s):
Absolutely. Another of the researchers on our team shared her experience using French marriage records from churches. And Melanie Whitt said, similar to the Polish Church records for marriages, French church records are quite informative. This is actually the case in the European countries with a state church where I’ve researched Sweden, Norway, France, Germany, Belgium and Italy. French church records for marriages predominant prior to the advent of Vita Civil in 1792. Three typically record the name residents occupation, age, and names of parents also whether living or deceased for the bride. And groom witnesses were often family members and sometimes the relationship is noted additionally, if either bride or groom or widowed, the name of the earlier spouse was usually recorded too.

Nicole (11m 34s):
Though there may be some slight chronological regional variations and data points. I’ve seen this full set of info on marriage entries as far back as the early 16 hundreds. All French church records are held geographically within the Archives for each department. You can Google the department name with the words Archives, depart mentalities or departmental Archives to find the relevant departmental Archives website. Once there, you’ll need to know the commune, essentially the parish within the department where your subjects lived and married. French church records in general are quite organized, abundant, and full of valuable information. They center on baptisms, marriages, and burials, margin notes, or sometimes the entry itself can sometimes lead you from one set of records to another, allowing you to readily connect these vital events for an individual.

Nicole (12m 26s):
So Thank you to Melanie for giving us all of this great information about French marriage records recorded in the church records.

Diana (12m 33s):
That makes me wish we had some French Ancestors. That would be so fun. We

Nicole (12m 38s):
Probably do somewhere. We just gotta find them

Diana (12m 40s):
Far back, far back. Well some of them I have seen going to the Al Sas region, but they were actually Germans living in that region. I believe this is maybe our Schultz line. Oh, so interesting. Well then we have the Church of England marriages and with our England heritage, we actually have some of these in our own ancestry. So our ancestry, Edward Kre married Ann Morris on 21 June, 1835 in Charley Parish, Lancaster England. And the marriage record contains the names and residences of the bride and groom. It includes their state, which meant that he was a bachelor and she was a spinster, meaning they hadn’t been married before.

Diana (13m 25s):
And the marriage included the names of two witnesses. And we love witnesses because they’re part of the fan club. They’re often related to the couple. And in Edward and Ann’s marriage, the witnesses were George Hindel and Elizabeth Morris. While doing some research, you discovered that Elizabeth Morris was Ann’s aunt and that Elizabeth would marry George Hindel the next year. So the witnesses were the aunt and uncle to be of the bride. I think so many times we see a surname we don’t recognize and we just don’t know if they were related or not. So we have to do more research. Well, this couple was married by bands, which was a public announcement of the marriage in case anyone had knowledge of an impediment, like a previous marriage or lack of parental consent.

Diana (14m 10s):
And another option was to be married by consent. And then the marriage form used by the parish tells you exactly how that works. So, you know, it’s really neat to see these records from the Church of England. All right, let’s have a word from our sponsor, newspapers.com. newspapers.com is your ultimate resource for Discovering your family’s history. Explore more than 800 million newspaper pages in their vast collections spanning three centuries. newspapers.com is your gateway to exploring the past with papers from the us, uk, Canada, Australia, and beyond. Trace your family’s journey and uncover the extraordinary tales of your Ancestors through newspaper stories, birth and marriage announcements, obituaries, photos, and much more.

Diana (14m 59s):
For listeners of today’s show, newspapers.com is extending a discount of 20% off on a publisher, extra subscription. Just use the code family Locket at checkout. Don’t miss out on this incredible opportunity.

Nicole (15m 13s):
Well, let’s talk now about a colonial Virginia parish marriage. In a recent client project, one of our researchers found a marriage record for one of the common ancestral couples for a cluster of autosomal D n A matches. And the common ancestral couple is John Woodall and Dorothy Pledge. Their marriage was recorded in the Douglas Register for the St. James Northam Parish in Gland County, Virginia in 1756. The marriage is part of a family search index called Virginia Marriages 1785 to 1940 and is originally from the Douglas Register, which was published in 1928 and is available in digital format at Family Search.

Nicole (15m 56s):
The books forward contains the following description. For a great many years, it has been the sincere desire of all those interested in the early records of Virginia to make the contents of the celebrated Douglas Register available to the public. But the owners’ descendants of the Reverend Mr. Douglas would not agree to its publication. It has been the good fortune of the writer to have succeeded in obtaining the consent of the present owner, Mr. Hunter Fielding Warner Lewis to this publication, the Reverend William Douglas came to St. James Ham Parish in Gland County, Virginia, Dover Church on the 12th of October, 1750. A memorandum in the register shows that he had the charge of St. James Ham Parish for 27 years, mannequin Town, king William Parish for 19 years and ministered to a charge in Buckingham County for four years.

Nicole (16m 42s):
There had been, according to his statement, no parish register kept up to the time that he took charge. He began on the 15th of September, 1753, keeping a record of the marriages performed by him. The book in which the register is kept was procured by him at the beginning of the year 1756, and was kept from that time until near the time of his death, which occurred on the 7th of February, 1798. But he inserted many of the marriages performed by him before 1756. And in the matter of births, the record goes back to 1705, including the names and dates Birth of children given to him by their parents who desired them. Recorded The book is made of the old government stamped paper and is bound in calf and parchment.

Nicole (17m 25s):
It is in a good state of preservation, though in some places the margin is worn or broken and there are several pages missing. Well, I looked for original images of this book, but I couldn’t find any. So this derivative might be the only surviving record of the marriages Douglas recorded. And although the original existed in 1928, it may still be in the hands of the descendants of Mr. Douglas. So all we have to look at is this derivative book. This is a simple marriage record stating only the names of the couple and the date they were married. It also gives the page number of the original register. However, the detail that this couple lived in the parish at that time has helped develop a hypothesis for our research.

Nicole (18m 8s):
Question about the parents of a female born in the 1780s. There were autosomal D N A matches going back to the Woodall family and the bowling family who also happened to live in that same area in gland. Some of the bowling children’s baptisms were also recorded in the Douglas Register. So we think it’s possible that a child from the Woodall family married a bowling and were the parents of our female research subject. So finding this marriage record gave us a record to help us latch onto for this hypothesis to really take form.

Diana (18m 41s):
So interesting. So, you didn’t find an an actual marriage of the Bowlings and Woodall or, or did we?

Nicole (18m 51s):
Yeah, so we found the marriage for John Woodall and Dorothy Pledge.

Diana (18m 57s):
Oh,

Nicole (18m 57s):
Okay. So we think that they could have been the ancestral couple of, a bunch of these D N A matches. We don’t have all of their children’s births. So we think that the female that we’re looking for could have been a daughter of this couple, but maybe her birth was recorded on one of those missing pages from the Douglas Register, or just wasn’t recorded ’cause they had moved. But the marriage of those two kind of brings together two clusters of D N A matches.

Diana (19m 27s):
Oh, that’s exciting. And sometimes that’s all you have is a record like this that is a derivative. But we’re so grateful when something exists, even though it’s not ideal. It’s so great to have that.

Nicole (19m 42s):
Right. It’s something, yeah,

Diana (19m 43s):
It is something. Well the next example is a Catholic marriage record. And this is from the Archdiocese of Atlanta, Georgia. And the marriage was recorded by the priest TJ Clary on a pre-printed Latin form. And the marriage record includes the names of the parties, their father’s names, and their places of residence. It also includes several witnesses. And this particular marriage record is rare for Catholic marriage records in that it is digitized and included index in an ancestry.com Collection, which is titled Atlanta Georgia, US Catholic Archdiocese of Atlanta, sacramental Records 1840 to 1980.

Diana (20m 24s):
So often the Catholic Church records are not publicly available online. So this is neat that this one is available and it’s fun to see the image of it with the Latin pre-printed form and then all the handwritten in information. So Catholic marriage records can be all over the United States, wherever there was a group, as can any of these other religions. So it’s always so great to look for Church, Marriage Records, especially if maybe there is no civil marriage record that exists anymore.

Nicole (20m 58s):
Right. And that’s the case in a lot of places where there were not marriage records recorded civilly or they were lost or burned or whatever. Okay, where can we find Church Marriage Records? Well, family Search has digitized many of the Church of England parish registers and other European countries, church records, So, you can always start there in the Family search catalog. Some churches have not allowed their records to be digitized. The Roman Catholic Church does not usually allow free access to their church records. Each diocese handles it differently and you must request the records to see if you can access them. This can be more work, but it has the potential to unlock really great clues.

Nicole (21m 39s):
Some countries have national level Archives with online access to their Church Marriage Records like Poland and France. Others require that you hire an onsite researcher in order to access them. Sometimes church records require a little more work to access, but they can be very rewarding. Often a church marriage record in the US will reveal the hometown and parents’ names of an Emigrant Ancestor in the late 18 hundreds and early 19 hundreds. Many churches have their own Archives where they keep records. For example, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints has the Church history Library with manuscript collections and some digital records. Their website allows you to search collections and learn whether they’re digitized and open to research.

Nicole (22m 23s):
We saw a book of marriages performed by Matthias Foss Cali that was digitized on the Church History Library website So. you can see some examples of marriages available at an archive from a church. Be sure to check the Family Search Wiki for help finding Church Marriage Records. Often there will be Wiki pages dedicated to the records of a specific church. So good luck as you search for Church Marriage Records. And if you want to learn more about other type of marriage records, we have several blog posts about them. We have one about Marriage Bonds, civil marriage records and Substitute marriage records.

Diana (23m 0s):
Right? It’s been fun to talk about Church Marriage Records. And I remember that Roots Tech a few years ago that FindmyPast announced they were getting a lot of Catholic Church records digitized and access on their websites. so I just looked it up. And they have got marriage records for New York. These are all Catholic, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Chicago. So they also have baptisms as well. But that’s neat to see more of those. So if any of those will sound like your locality, that is a really great place to look at. Is FindmyPast so kind of neat to see more and more collections coming online for us to use?

Nicole (23m 47s):
Yeah, that is, and it’s so important to do locality research to fully understand where the best places are for databases and digitized images and you know, which Archives exist for your specific project. So we can never skip locality research, especially when we’re, you know, researching an Ancestor lived in a place we’re not experienced in researching at.

Diana (24m 8s):
Right. And this is why we teach the Locality Guide. And one of the things I like to do with my locality guides is to put the update date at the top of it so that I know when is the last time I looked for additional record sets. Because for instance, with this Catholic marriage record Collection, you know, perhaps I had done a guide on Cincinnati say five or 10 years ago, and now this new Collection is online. And of course we want to revisit our locality guides and see if new things have come online. And then we can see when we last did a check. so I typically do that when I’m starting a new research project in that locality.

Diana (24m 49s):
So, so important to grab all of these great websites and URLs and get those added to our Collection on our locality guides so we don’t forget about different places where records are available.

Nicole (25m 3s):
That’s so true and I just have to recommend Google Docs for keeping your locality guide. It’s such a great place to create a digital document that you probably won’t ever need to print. Usually we just, at least we just keep these digitally and you can turn it into the page list format so that you don’t have page breaks awkwardly, you know, for something you’re never gonna print. Also, there’s a version history for every Google Doc and you can view the version history and see when you last updated it, even if you didn’t remember to write down when you last updated it. Oh, nice. So there’s a lot of things going for Google Docs and you can also keep all of your Google Docs for free, for free storage and your Google Drive doesn’t take up space there.

Nicole (25m 46s):
And you can create folders for all of your localities and put those Google Docs right into those folders.

Diana (25m 52s):
And you can easily share Google Docs So. you could create a locality guide and collaborate with another researcher. Maybe you’ve got a sibling or cousin and someone else and you’re both working on the same location. You could have a Google Doc that you share between the two of you and you both edit it and work on it at various times. So that’s another really neat thing you can do. Very, very easy to share, comment, and really work together on on a Project

Nicole (26m 20s):
Well. that was a fun little detour about locality guides. Well, I hope you guys are all keeping great locality guides and we will talk to you again next week. Alright,

Diana (26m 30s):
Bye-bye everyone.

Nicole (26m 32s):
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 d a on amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at family Locket dot com slash 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 at family Locket dot com slash newsletter. Please Subscribe rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.