True, but as the 19th century progressed, irregular marriages become less and less frequent. As jimrobertson24 knows the place of the marriage and didn't give a date, I'm assuming he has a post-1855 marriage certificate, which says where the marriage took place. He also says he's found the family in the census so is clearly talking about a period after 1841. The marriage certificate will say how and by who the marriage was conducted, and the most likely is by banns by a kirk minister.
You are right about all that, but it is still not true that "you only needed an authorised person to conduct the marriage". This was never the case before 1939. It would have been perfectly possible for a couple, at any time until 1939, to be legally married by declaration in a farm house or anywhere else they chose. Not that the mode of marriage affects the answer to Jim's original question, of course.
It is perfectly true that a marriage is most likely to be by a minister after banns, but it is definitely not true to say that what the kirk (but
not the law) frowned on as 'irregular' died out soon after 1855. If anything, such marriages increased in popularity in the early 20th century, until 1939 when a change in the law provided for non-religious marriages to be performed in a registration office.
I have in my own tree 88 couples who were married by declaration in the presence of witnesses after 1855. Of these only 15 were in the 1800s, 7 between 1900 and 1909, 19 between 1910 and 1919, 19 between 1920 and 1929 and 18 between 1930 and 1939. To put it another way, nearly two-thirds of them were after 1910; and there were more such marriages in each decade after 1910 than there had been in the four and a half decades from 1855 to 1899.
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Topic: why marry there? (Read 2338 times)