RLP 371: Comparing Marriage Records – Original License and Return vs. Marriage Book Entry

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro Episode 371: Comparing Marriage Records: Original Licence and Return vs Marriage Book Entry. 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 genealogy professional. Diana and Nicole are the mother-daughter team at 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 (43s):
Let’s go. Today’s episode is sponsored by Newspapers.com. Hi everyone. Welcome to Research Like a Pro.

Diana (50s):
Hi Nicole. How are you doing today?

Nicole (53s):
Really well. I’m enjoying working on my Sally Keaton research and I’ve been making great new discoveries with the children of Sarah Sally Keaton Reeves and DNA matches are just amazing how they can discover these new lines of children that haven’t been connected before.

Diana (1m 14s):
That is wonderful and such an important thing to do when you’re working so far back in a place like Tennessee and the records aren’t there and when you’re working with the women, so that’s exciting.

Nicole (1m 27s):
It is. I get excited every time I find a new descendant.

Diana (1m 31s):
Yeah.

Nicole (1m 32s):
What about you? What have you’ve been reading?

Diana (1m 34s):
Well, I’m continuing to read my book titled Women in the Law of Property in Early America by Marilyn Salmon. And I’ve talked about this on the podcast before, but I work slowly through the book. It’s very content heavy, you know, so it’s not like I can just sit down and read it for an hour at a time. I read about 10 minutes a day, you know, two or three pages really soaking in all the information. But I’m getting close to the last chapters. So the latest chapter’s been all about trust. So when women had property they would often set up a trust, and a trustee perhaps, to oversee her property.

Diana (2m 16s):
And the idea was that the husband shouldn’t have control of it because they were always worried about coercion. You know, the men would coerce the woman to sell when they didn’t want to. And so they felt like a third party, a trustee, would do a better job of managing the trust. But several of the cases that the author shows, the trustees sometimes were negligent or they were dishonest and they absolutely did a terrible job of managing the property. And so these poor women knew that and they were trying to get out from under the whole legal part of the trust and the trustee. So it’s just very interesting to see the different things that happened throughout history.

Diana (3m 1s):
And by the beginning of the 1800s after the revolution, things are getting better for women. They’re starting to let them have more control of their property, you know, I mean it took, it took the whole 1800s to get better about that. But it’s interesting to see the progression from early colonial up to where we are now in, you know, pre-1850 ish. So anyway, it’s been fascinating and I love it because I’m working on research that includes a couple of women who had property and I’m seeing the records that are left for them in a new light, you know, reading all this context and all this history about what was going on at this time.

Nicole (3m 44s):
How wonderful. I’m so glad you’re sharing little bits of this book with us as we go along.

Diana (3m 49s):
Yeah, it’s fun and as I said, I take it very small bites so I can really digest it because the author does discuss specific cases and how the judges ruled on that or the the courts. And so it’s really interesting to see these specific examples all the way through.

Nicole (4m 6s):
Yeah, that’s a really great way to illustrate what’s happening and I always appreciate when there’s a good example or case to review.

Diana (4m 17s):
Right.

Nicole (4m 18s):
Alright, well tomorrow is our Research Like a Pro webinar and this is by Torhild Shirley and it’s called Tracing Karolius: Norwegian Research on a WWII Evacuee’s Journey. And we’re looking forward to hearing about Norwegian research in World War II with her. We’re happy to have Torhild on our team as an accredited genealogist professional and she has a lot of experience, so it’ll be really great to learn from her. And our next study group is beginning really soon, in about a week. So you have a couple more days to register, so we hope you’ll join us if you’re still thinking about it. If you’re on the fence, now is a great time to work on your documentary research in the study group. If you haven’t joined our newsletter yet, you can do that.

Nicole (4m 58s):
It comes out every Monday and you can get notifications of our new posts, podcasts, upcoming lectures, and any deals we’re running. Coming up soon is the Association of Professional Genealogist PMC conference on September 18th through the 20th. That’s virtual and I’ll be teaching at at the conference about Growing Your Online Reach with AI tools. So that will be fun. I enjoy talking about business and things once a year at this conference. Well, we’ll also be attending the Texas State Genealogical Society conference that that is virtual on November 7th through 8th.

Diana (5m 34s):
All right, well today we are talking all about marriage records and we’re always trying to find an original record, but sometimes we’re not sure if what we have is the most original record. So a lot of times we look at an entry in a county marriage record book and wonder is this truly original or is it a derivative copied from an original marriage certificate into the marriage book? And we often don’t have both of those to compare, but I happen to have both copies of a marriage record. And so I thought it would be really fun to really do a close comparison and see if we could learn more about the process of recording these marriages.

Diana (6m 19s):
So my dad began researching the family in the 1970s and at that time he was writing to courthouses and state government agencies usually in Texas and Oklahoma, which is where the family was. And in 1977 he wrote to the Milam County Texas Courthouse seeking the record of John C Harris’s second marriage to Rebecca D. Alford. And that occurred in 1888 and the clerk responded with a letter and it’s so fun because I have the letter. He said, dear Mr. Shults, enclosed is a copy of the marriage record on John C. Harris and Rebecca Harris married, married 1888.

Diana (7m 2s):
Enclosed also is the original marriage license. We hope you will be happy to receive this. We were not able to locate the marriage record on John C. Harris and Elizabeth married in 1865 as the courthouse burned down and everything on record was destroyed in 1874. If this office can be of service to you at any time, please do not fail to call on us. Very truly yours, Wayne b Wieser, County Clerk, Milam County, Texas. Well it was really neat to see that letter and that first marriage to Elizabeth we actually found in a different county. So we have that marriage record because it was not in a county that burned, which was great. But the one that we’re talking about today was John C Harris’s second marriage.

Diana (7m 46s):
He is my second great-grandfather and as he said in the letter, he sent both the original marriage license and a black and white photocopy of it. So when I looked carefully at the image and I do have screenshots, images of this in the blog post, if you want to go to a look at it, you can see different colors of ink was used. So he used brown for the license in the top half of the document or whoever filled out the top half. And then there was purple ink for the marriage return on the bottom half. And then also you can see in the image a raised bronze seal and that features the words county court of Milam County Texas printed around a star.

Diana (8m 31s):
So it’s a cool seal, it’s really a beautiful document and it’s so fun to have this original.

Nicole (8m 38s):
Yeah, it is beautiful and I love the purple ink and I have to wonder if it was originally purple or blue and it just became purple over time, but it probably was purple. Maybe it was like indigo or whatever. I don’t know. But it’s so pretty. I also love that the clerk just decided to send the original. I feel like that doesn’t happen anymore. You know, like here, I hope you’ll enjoy that, I’m giving you this special original marriage license. And I also wonder when he said enclosed as a copy of the marriage record and then also the original marriage license, do you still have the copied one? I wondered if it was like something different than the license, maybe a copy of what they had in the book or something?

Diana (9m 20s):
Nope, it’s just a photocopy of it. I don’t know why he used that wording. It’s exactly the same thing. It’s the black and white photocopy of it.

Nicole (9m 28s):
So funny, like I’m so that I have a copy of it when I have the original.

Diana (9m 33s):
Yeah, So I guess he was just being thorough.

Nicole (9m 35s):
It was great. Well maybe he was going to send the copy and then decided to throw in the real thing. I don’t know,

Diana (9m 41s):
Maybe. You know, maybe they were trying to clear out their records, but I really thought it was very interesting that he was just happy to send that to my dad. And

Nicole (9m 49s):
Maybe they were in the process of lightening, some of their records. Yeah, I mean if they have it in the record book, they probably didn’t feel like they needed a duplicate of the original

Diana (9m 58s):
Maybe. Yeah, I have no idea. But this is not the first time that I have received an original that’s happened before when I sent for, I believe it was Texas again a courthouse. And this was for an extended family member, like a great uncle I believe. I can’t remember exactly who. And they just sent me the original marriage record and I was just like, oh, okay, well thank you.

Nicole (10m 23s):
That’s awesome. You just have a, you and grandpa, you write letters so convincingly that people will send you the originals

Diana (10m 32s):
I guess, I guess, or in Texas they’re trying to clean out. I don’t know. Or it, we just got very lucky.

Nicole (10m 38s):
Well from my experience with the Love County courthouse, it seems like they’re always trying to make, you know, make space for all the records they have. So like putting things out in the old jail as a storage room. So yeah, I can see why they would not mind sending one paper away

Diana (10m 53s):
If somebody requested it went to all the bother and it’s like, oh this p, this person will take care of this maybe, so.

Nicole (10m 59s):
Alright, well let’s examine this document further so we can see that it was a pre-printed form issued by the state of Texas and the clerk filled in the county, the names of the bridegroom and the dates of the marriage license. And then the wedding officiator was supposed to fill in the bottom half once the wedding was performed and returned the whole thing to the clerk. The couple obtained the marriage license on January 24th, 1888 and were married two days later on January 26th. And the person who married them was named HL Clark, Minister of the Gospel. And comparing the handwriting between the upper portion, the license and the lower portion, the return, it is evident that two different men filled out the record.

Nicole (11m 48s):
The county clerk WM Baines filled out the top half and HL Clark the minister filled out the bottom half. The letters are formed quite differently and the pen used as different brown versus purple ink like we talked about. And so you can clearly see the two different hands that were used to write various parts of this form. That’s always really neat and can be a good indication that you are looking at a at an original if you’re not sure. So the document was folded into quarters with the title page of the marriage license and filing information completed. The title page says marriage license JC Harris, Mrs RD Harris issued Jan January, which it uses the abbreviation JANY, which is common in the 1800s, issued January 24th, 1888.

Nicole (12m 42s):
WM Baines County clerk returned and filed for record the 28th day of January AD 1888 and recorded the ninth day of February, 1888 WM Baines Clerk by LBW.

Diana (12m 57s):
Right. It was neat to see how this was actually stored, what’s folded up and then it had that little title page. So I can just imagine perhaps there was a file cabinet where it had all of these, ’cause it’s a large document, you know, nicely folded up and then searching through it. You could easily see or even I’m sure when they gave it out, they would want to give them something that could fit in a pocket. You know, you wouldn’t wanna give somebody this great big huge paper so they had it all nicely folded into quarters and then it would be easy, you know, to to hand around, take to the marriage, get it filled out, bring it back.

Nicole (13m 33s):
Right. And it’s not just like how you’d imagine folding a paper into quarters, like folding it in half and then folding it in half again, it’s kind of more like folded accordion style or like a pamphlet where you have a long section that’s been repeated four times.

Diana (13m 48s):
Yeah, I think a pamphlet’s like a good description of that. Well now let’s have a word from our sponsor. Ever wondered what life was really like for your ancestors? With Newspapers.com you can explore the world they lived in through their eyes, in their time. Search over a billion newspaper pages dating from 1690 to 2025 and uncover the stories that shaped your family’s past from birth and wedding announcements to obituaries and community news. These pages hold the milestones and everyday moments that connect you to your roots, but it’s more than names and dates, it’s about standing in their shoes. Picture reading the local paper your great grandmother once held or stumbling on a forgotten article about your grandfather’s first business.

Diana (14m 32s):
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Nicole (14m 54s):
Right. So now that we’ve talked about the original marriage license and return, let’s examine the entry for the same marriage in the Milam County Texas marriage book, which county clerk WM Baines maintained. The marriage book was filmed at the county courthouse on August 19th, 1975 by the Genealogical Society of Utah, now Family Search International, these records are now digitized and available on Family Search for viewing, which is always wonderful. And if you go to the blog post where we have all the images for this, you can see the images and compare them in the image we are sharing from the Family Search digitizing, you can see that there are four images on one page and you can see the Harris marriage in the top right corner.

Nicole (15m 42s):
Well, to learn more about the original marriage book, you can scroll back through the digitized images to find the actual volume and the dates. And this is such an important to thing to do, especially for making your citation. Before I learned how to do this, I never really knew what I was looking at. It helps so much to realize this is a bound volume at a county courthouse and it’s there’s volume number and so the page number isn’t just some floating page, it belongs to a volume. Anyway, so scrolling back you can see that this is volume four and it covers the year’s 1886 to 1889 and the image shows that this is page 234 in the volume.

Nicole (16m 24s):
And zooming in on the Harris marriage record, we can see that the wording in the marriage book is identical to the wording on the marriage license issued by the courthouse to the couple and then returned by the minister. WM Baines County clerk appears to have filled in the marriage license information, but the marriage return certifying the HL Clark Minister of the Gospel performed the ceremony is in a different handwriting, likely that of the Deputy LB, but we don’t know for sure.

Diana (16m 53s):
Right. It was so fun to do the analysis and comparison of this and I couldn’t figure out the WM Baines, his first two initials, at first because he kind of signs it really weird, just like a bunch of looks like a bunch of m’s. But when the deputy wrote it out then I thought, oh okay, this is a different handwriting. It’s WM Baines. So you know, it’s always really good to get really picky and look at the details so you understand what you’re looking at. So after I looked at both of these marriage records, both the original that went to the minister and then the one that was copied into the book, I concluded that these were both original records because it looked like they were created definitely at the time of the event and represented the first recording of the event.

Diana (17m 47s):
And it really helped me to understand better the process of recording the marriage and the care taken by the minister, county clerk, and deputy to ensure accuracy. So what I think happened was the counties were issued these books and then they were issued the loose separate marriage certificate and license and they’re exactly the same printed form and so they would just be filling it out, you know, at the same time both the county book and then the actual copy of the marriage license. So I was really fortunate to have this because we don’t often have these handed down or sent to my father by the county clerk.

Diana (18m 31s):
So really taking a look at these can help us understand and use the information in our research with more confidence. Now I know that these marriage record books, they were original records, they were created at the time of the marriage and you know, we put a lot of store by original records so it’s good to know. And would this be the same in every instance in every county? You know, we can’t say that. We just know that when we have something we have to really do our due diligence in doing some analysis and trying to understand how the record was created and what we are looking at.

Nicole (19m 9s):
Yeah, I like that. I think about how in Evidence Explained, it talks about duplicate originals that were made at the same exact time. I think sometimes we think of the recording in the marriage book as being a derivative because people are like the clerk is reading from the original and rewriting it down. So there’s that as well. But it is interesting to compare these two and see how accurate they are and that it kind of has more of a feel of like the duplicate original that we’re, you know, they were created at the same time. It’s not like this was recopied years later and the county clerk was writing it down, he wrote it down on the license and then he wrote it down on in the book.

Nicole (19m 53s):
So it’s a little more nuanced than just saying this is derivative or this is original.

Diana (19m 57s):
Yeah. So it was nice to be able to compare and just to really see what was going on at the time.

Nicole (20m 3s):
So what would you call this certificate that’s in the book? This is the marriage book that has the certificates in it,

Diana (20m 11s):
Right? Well it has it, it’s just a marriage record book. So the first half of it is the license, the second half is the marriage return where they are saying they performed the marriage. So I usually just call it a marriage record because

Nicole (20m 26s):
Right, because it has both,

Diana (20m 27s):
you know, it’s got both and you know, nowadays we often have a separate certificate, but in this case they just use the same form for everything.

Nicole (20m 37s):
Well I wonder if they gave the couple their own copy of a certificate, you know, that they could take home.

Diana (20m 44s):
I wonder. Yeah, maybe.

Nicole (20m 45s):
So is it your idea then that the clerk filled out his book and the paper, loose paper license, at the same time and then when the minister of the gospel came back with the license filled out, then he finished it?

Diana (20m 59s):
Well the person who filled out the return in the actual county marriage book was the deputy clerk and at the very bottom of it says per SB, I think or LB, and looking through all the different records in that book, the same deputy clerk was doing that. So my guess is that he was, you know, an assistant. He was, he was the assistant clerk and when the returns came back in it was his job to go fill it out because the handwriting is different once again on that part than the minister’s handwriting.

Nicole (21m 33s):
Yeah, so that makes sense. So the clerk fills out the marriage book and the license at the same time, then he sends the couple or whoever came and got it with the loose license, when they get married the Minister of the Gospel fills it out, then he brings it back and the deputy or assistant records that in the marriage book on the same page that the clerk had already filled out. And that reminds me that sometimes I have seen a marriage license in a record book like this without the second half filled out.

Diana (22m 10s):
Right, because they never got married,

Nicole (22m 12s):
They didn’t, they didn’t get married or they didn’t get the return recorded or some for some reason.

Diana (22m 19s):
Exactly, exactly. So that would help you to know that they really were filling out the license both times simultaneously the loose form and the book.

Nicole (22m 28s):
Right. Well this has been so fun to really dive deep into this whole process of recording and issuing marriage licenses and returns and how it works and whether it’s a original or derivative, I guess you know, you could say that the license in the marriage record book is original, like a duplicate original while the part that the deputy copied in from what the minister of the Gospel wrote is a derivative. And so it’s both.

Diana (22m 54s):
Yeah, you could say that.

Nicole (22m 56s):
’cause the deputy was like, what if the deputy couldn’t read the names very well and he got the Minister of the Gospel’s name wrong or something, you know,

Diana (23m 3s):
Or the date wrong. Yeah,

Nicole (23m 4s):
Because he was trying to read it from whatever they wrote.

Diana (23m 9s):
Yeah.

Nicole (23m 9s):
So that’s something to think about too that sometimes we are looking at a rec, a source, that has both original and derivative aspects of it.

Diana (23m 17s):
Well and sometimes you have a conflict between the records. I know in one instance the year was clearly wrong because the license was issued I think something like, let’s just say December, 1850 and then it said that the license was issued say 1851, and then it said that the marriage was actually performed in January of 1851, which would’ve been like 12 months before the license was issued. And my feeling was that they were just all used to writing 1851, they hadn’t made the change to 1852. You know, so sometimes we see a weird conflict like that and we go, okay, I think this is probably what happened.

Nicole (23m 55s):
Yeah. And I’ve seen names spelled differently for the like bride or groom between the license and the return. So that’s always fun. So it makes more sense if they’re filled out by different people on different dates then that would mean be why that could happen.

Diana (24m 12s):
Right? Yeah, just human error or for whatever reason maybe the Minister of the Gospel didn’t know how to spell the name of the couple or wrote it funny and then the deputy knew them or knew how to spell better. Yeah.

Nicole (24m 28s):
So

Diana (24m 28s):
Lots of funny things that we can think of.

Nicole (24m 31s):
That’s so funny. Well I was going to note that I did use the source in my kinship determination project because the subject of the second generation for that project was John C. Harris. And so this was part of the life story of John when he got married again. So he was in, he was originally married to Melissa Welch, not Elizabeth, we thought her name was Elizabeth. But when we found her original marriage record and just studied her name, we found out she always went by Melissa. But on a couple of the death certificates, which happened to both be informed by Dock Harris, he said his mother’s name was Elizabeth or Lissi.

Nicole (25m 11s):
And so it has been so interesting studying the Harris family and their time in Milam County, Texas and I’m really excited to share more about what I learned and making my kinship determination project when I give another presentation later this year about it. But it’s fun to talk about the Harris family after doing that project. I worked on this all of last year, so 2024 was dedicated to working on the Harris family and I was able to send for records at the Texas State Library and Archives and they gave me tax records. I found a lot of digitized tax records online, but for some of the later ones in the 1900s I had to order them. But it’s just been pretty amazing what you can find now and and what was challenging with Milam County and Full Text search is that the records for Milam County are locked.

Nicole (26m 0s):
So you can only access them if you’re in a Family History Center or Family Search Center. And from what I’ve heard, I haven’t tried this yet, that if you go to the Family History Centers now you can access the locked records with Full Text Search. Whereas when I tried it last year it didn’t work. So I’m hoping that’s the case now. I don’t know if you’ve tried that yet.

Diana (26m 20s):
No, I haven’t. But that would be great if you could still use Full Text Search because it’s just so much better. It’s such a good way to search,

Nicole (26m 29s):
Right? It is. I remember when I was gathering all the sources for this and calling you and being like, what is this original marriage record that you have in the folder for John C. Harris? How did you get that ?

Diana (26m 46s):
It’s

Nicole (26m 47s):
Than the one online. So fun to discover that and talk about it.

Diana (26m 50s):
It was, it was fun to dig through and find that. And you know, something that’s interesting that we haven’t mentioned is that this marriage is for JC Harris and Mrs RD Harris because she had previously been married to John’s brother.

Nicole (27m 6s):
Right.

Diana (27m 6s):
And so her name was Harris and the marriage didn’t last long, they were only married a few years.

Nicole (27m 11s):
Yeah. So it is really interesting that John C. Harris married his brother’s widow and you know, as I’ve thought about that, I thought how difficult it must have been in Milam County, Texas at that time after the Civil War to make a living as a widow. It was just declining as far as the economics there and people were moving away and stuff. I think originally a lot of cotton farming was going on. So I think what happened is that John C. Harris moved back to Milam, he wasn’t living there, and he married her and brought in all of her children and they were raised together with our ancestor Dock Harris as close siblings.

Nicole (27m 52s):
And we actually didn’t know too much about Rebecca’s children before I did my KDP, I was able to flush them out quite a bit and it was really neat to see how they kind of took care of each other. I believe Rebecca died about 1907. She was present on the 1900 census and then John C. Harris got married again not too long after that. I think it was 1908. And so when John got married to Arza, I’m pretty sure that must have been because Rebecca died. So he got married three times and that made my KDP really challenging because I had to track all of his children from all of his wives.

Nicole (28m 37s):
And even though he and Rebecca probably didn’t have any children, although it’s possible that they did, because she did say that she had one, six children and five living on the 1900 census. So I didn’t, didn’t know if that one child that died was between her and her first husband or her second. So I just put it as a possible child of John C. But on my KDP I did have to list all of his children and stepchildren, which I originally didn’t think I needed to include the stepchildren, but I decided to go ahead and be really thorough and I’m glad that I did because it, I think it really added a lot to understand them and their lives were, those stepchildren really did become like his chil his children because his brother was gone And then when Rebecca died, He was the only parent for them and they were really close with, especially some of the younger ones were close with Dock Harris, which is our ancestor John’s son Dock.

Nicole (29m 35s):
So I’m glad that I studied their lives and figured out all about them.

Diana (29m 40s):
Oh that’s great. Well I’m glad you did too because that was always an interesting thing to me when I was doing this research, you know, like 20 years ago wondering about that situation. So that’s neat.

Nicole (29m 55s):
Right. So when I was doing the cemetery research on this family, I had the opportunity to go to Burneyville Cemetery in Love County and I found that John C Harris’s headstone was, it was still there but it was broken and kind of buried and there was nothing legible left on it and it was made out of concrete. So I think that over time that just gets so weathered you can’t, there’s nothing left to read. So on Find A Grave it just said that he was buried there in Burneyville but it didn’t say it didn’t have a picture of his headstone. And so going back to Rebecca, since we don’t have like a death record for her, it was before they kept death records at the state level consistently.

Nicole (30m 37s):
But there is a Find a Grave entry for her with the death date of 1907 and the death place of Burneyville. So I think we all just kind of assume that’s where she died. It says burial details unknown, but I wouldn’t be surprised she died 11 years before John C. Harris did. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was buried there. But then her headstone is not existent anymore like his if, if it was during that time period where they used the concrete to make the headstones and, and they were also doing like this style where the headstone is really skinny. So when they’re skinny like that, I think it’s easier to break and fall off.

Diana (31m 15s):
Hmm. Makes sense.

Nicole (31m 16s):
So it’s unclear exactly when and where she died, but I think it’s a pretty good bet that she died before John C. Harris got married again. And so that’s kind of where the story of John C. Harris and Rebecca’s marriage ends. So he got married again March 8th, 1908 to a young woman from Love County named Arzabelle Zora Spry.

Diana (31m 40s):
Right. And we actually have a picture of them out on the homestead with kind of the house in the background and a windmill to the side. That’s a great picture.

Nicole (31m 50s):
It’s a really fun picture and it’s such a postcard looking scene like it’s just very formal. I love it.

Diana (31m 59s):
Yeah, like they wanted to really show this is the house, you know, this is the place and let’s record this as well as just people. ’cause sometimes in those older photographs you get just the people like in a studio. But this one you feel like he really wanted to have what he had built up, you know, his farm, his home captured on the photograph as well.

Nicole (32m 20s):
Yeah. And you can see the wall built out, built out of stone and and the house and it’s not a small house. I mean there’s like multiple, there’s like a big porch and a big side side part and the land has been cleared. I wonder if this was the home where he had the fire that the barn burned down or the place you went to after that. It’s hard to date it exactly, but it is really neat to see the faces of everyone and Arza standing there with her big skirt and her kind of scrunched up face like the sun was in her eyes and her formal hat on.

Diana (33m 3s):
Yep. That’s so great. Well it’s so fun. I’m glad that you worked on this family so much. You know, there were a lot of children to trace and it’s just good to get more about the family, learn more about them.

Nicole (33m 15s):
It is it, thanks for preserving and filing all of these cool original documents that this is probably one of the few original documents that you have from grandpa. I know there’s been others like letters and things, but you’ve always done such a good job of keeping these safe and filing them so that whenever I call and say can you please pull this record and make sure it’s in the folder?

Diana (33m 35s):
Well it’s good because I have not got through the digitization of my three boxes of folders. You know that back in the day when I’d print off every single census, print off every record and carefully file it in my paper files, I still have not got all of that transferred to digital. So I just try to work on that one family at a time, one project at a time. I really, it would be nice if I could take six months off from everything else I do and just do that project. Right. But that’s not gonna happen. So I just do it little by little as needed.

Nicole (34m 10s):
As needed by your daughter.

Diana (34m 12s):
Yes. And I kind of like having the paper files. I mean that represents years of my life and getting up at 6:00 AM in the morning before sending children off to school and just working for an hour, you know, in the morning before my busy day began. So it’s kind of fun to look back and think about all the research you know, that I did back in the day. And then some of it’s in your handwriting because you started also researching and putting records in there. So

Nicole (34m 38s):
That’s true. It is kind of sentimental to think about printing, printing out that census and writing the county at the top and filing it. I always used a red pen and it’s fun to, fun to do that. But it is nice to know that the censuses are all online so we don’t have to keep all of those and and can lighten the load of the documents you have to keep, but you have plenty of space. Right. You can keep all those.

Diana (35m 3s):
Yep. And it will eventually all come to you. So if I haven’t finished getting a digitized, guess what you get to do.

Nicole (35m 12s):
That’s funny. That’s so true.

Diana (35m 12s):
I’ll try to get it done in my lifetime.

Nicole (35m 17s):
Well it’s fine if you don’t. Like I said, it is sentimental of our first years together doing family history.

Diana (35m 23s):
Right.

Nicole (35m 23s):
Alright, well this has been a really fun episode. Thanks everyone for listening. We hope that this sheds some light on marriage records and the originals versus the marriage book entry for you. We hope you’ll send us in a comment if you have any originals, I’m curious, do you guys get originals sent to you by the county courthouse? Let us know. Alright everyone, have a great week and we’ll talk to you again next week. Bye.

Diana (35m 50s):
Alright, bye-bye.

Nicole (35m 49s):
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 booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at FamilyLocket.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 at FamilyLocket.com/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.