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Census Lookups General Lookups => Census and Resource Discussion => Topic started by: River Tyne Lass on Monday 13 August 18 08:34 BST (UK)
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http://www.marriage-locator.co.uk
A RootsChatter put this great link on a Northumberland thread recently.
I have been able to find exact Churches for several marriages I have been looking for. However, on some searches a message comes up saying the Church is between one or another named Church. Does this mean that the Church is literally between the two named choices or does it mean wedding could have taken place at any Church in distance between named two?
Also, there are references to 'cardinals'. Can anyone tell me what this means?
Any help will will be greatly appreciated.
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Finally, using an online service, or FreeBMD, to find the page numbers where those two marriages have been indexed. These two page numbers, representing the first and last marriages in a quarter, are what have been termed the "Cardinal Points" for that church.
See http://www.marriage-locator.co.uk/principles.html which explains the principles.
Stan
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Thank you very much Stan for your speedy help.
There seems to be a lot to read there. I have just finished nightshift and I am en route home so my brain is tired and not fully in gear. However, I will have a good read over this later today.
I would really like to get my head around this as I didn't know this great site existed. For several marriages I will now be able to go straight to the correct microfilm without having to make an educated guess regarding where this may have taken place. :D
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Excellent Question RTL
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Excellent Answer Stan.
I wonder if our Global moderators may consider posting this thread on the main boards everywhere ... including Australia for example. So many of the 'overseas' boards will surely find it useful information to help with their ancestors who emigrated from England and Wales.
JM
ADD, this is some NEW information for me, and I have been a family history buff since .... errr .... 1960s ... very NSW centric.
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Thank you JM for the compliment.
Since I came across this site on RootsChat the other day I have almost felt that I have a new genealogy 'toy'. It is quite delightful when discovering the exact Church for a marriage which you expected to have a long trawl to find.
Thanks to avm228 for posting this on the Northumberland board.
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Gold stars to avm :) then :)
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Perhaps it is worth reminding chatters that not all marriages take place in Church, so those that were in Register Offices will not be located through Marriage Locator.
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just marking this thread :) its a good un
xin
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Delighted to hear that people are finding this useful - I in turn was pointed to it by a fellow Rootschatter some time ago.
Perhaps it is worth reminding chatters that not all marriages take place in Church, so those that were in Register Offices will not be located through Marriage Locator.
Just to clarify on this: Marriage Locator will sometimes tell you that a marriage took place in a register office. Try this ref for an example, which came up on another thread: Sep qtr 1892 2b 937 (it’s Portsea RO). I don’t know how widespread their RO coverage is - Marriage Locator is a work in progress.
Where it says the reference is unknown but between parish A and parish B, I roughly understand it to mean that the marriage took place somewhere other than a C of E church, probably in the vicinity of parish A (because the parish church gets the low page numbers and you then move on to the nonconformist churches and the RO). But of course in some areas it can be more complicated - in urban centres there may be several C of E churches close together, and it’s possible that Marriage Locator just doesn’t yet have the references for some of them. Others on here will have far better knowledge than I do of the science of the GRO reference :)
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The Marriage Locator was mentioned in this post http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=725641.0 July 2015.
Stan
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It's quite complicated to explain how it works but you can see the workings if you have access to Ancestry who have transcribed and put parish register images online.
When civil registration started in 1837, all the Anglican churches in a particular registration district were put into alphabetical order and the indexes were compiled in that order.
Complications arise as parishes got bigger an new churches were consecrated.
Over the years the parish lists has in places changed it's order.
If you want to have a go yourself, find a county that is online at Ancestry ( I would suggest London & Middlesex as the registers are online and the marriage locator had a London focus when it was first started)
Select an early year and quarter on freebmd and then chose a registration district.
Dec 1837 Brentford is a good one.
Run the search and then copy and paste the results into an excel spreadsheet.
Use the spreadsheet to sort the list into page number order.
When you look at the results you should get 4 results per page number, not necessarily in the correct bridge and groom order.
Use Ancestry to search for the marriage by either name and year then look at the parish register image for that page and note who married who.
The page numbers become the cardinal points, where the first and last numbers in the quarter determine how the marriage locator works.
The page numbers will run sequentially, each new parish will start with an odd number.
Sometimes you get 2 numbers only. That could mean the other marriages on the page of the register fall into the next quarter.
If you see numbers that jump from 3 to 5 then that suggests a parish change.
You will also be able to work out where freebmd transcriptions are wrong either by transcriber or GRO compiler. You will also see the task involved for the GRO compiling the indexes, transcribing the parish register entries and trying to read the handwriting.
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Where it says the reference is unknown but between parish A and parish B, I roughly understand it to mean that the marriage took place somewhere other than a C of E church, probably in the vicinity of parish A
I think it's actually a parish alphabetically in the vicinity of A & B
So if A is known to be say Derby St Margarets and B is known to be Derby St Michael then a parish between A & B could be Derby St Marks or Derby St Marys, it's just that their exact range as detailed by Dawn above isn't known
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Thanks to all for the offered explanations. I am still not totally clear though on when two Churches or record offices are mentioned. It could just be me, en route from nightshift so brain tired probably not fully in gear.
I will give these two examples which I have searched for (two ancestors' marriages:the
1902 quarter 2 10b 254a
.. message states that this entry is located between entries for Newcastle St Peter and Blyth St Cuthbert
1874 quarter 4 10b 212
.. message states that this entry is located between entries for Elswick St Philip and Newcastle RO
There doesn't seem to be an alphabetical link. ???
I have had several successes in pinning down just one Church in the Newcastle upon Tyne registration district. These include marriages which took place at the churches of All Saints, Byker, St Michael & St Lawrence; Benwell, St James; St Nicholas Cathedral and St John the Baptist.
One of the marriages is that of my Grandfather's brother. I have been dabbling for a while here and there looking for his marriage without success - but now I am very pleased to find just the one Church pin-pointed.
I presume the 'volunteers' who carry out this work will be the Guild members?
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This is a guess...
Maybe the Newcastle churches are listed first and then it moves on to parishes starting A, B, C etc, then to the RC, Non-Conformist, Jewish and Registry Office
So in your first example it could be a Newcastle "St" church beginning with a name after Peter or a church in a parish beginning with A or B
In the second it could be quite a list for a parish beginning with E to Z e.g. Fenham, Heaton, Jesmond etc
As I say, guess only
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Thanks Steve for trying to help with your guesses. Both ancestors in the marriage examples were C of E and on my Mother's side of the family.
I think perhaps I could email the Guild. Hopefully they might be able to clarify these messages. If they can I will let you all know on here what they say.
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Hi Steve,
I think your guesses are plausible. I have just now sent off an email to the Guild. I am hoping they will let me know soon what is meant when two Churches are named, as in my examples above.
I will post on what they tell me in any reply I receive as it may be helpful to other RootsChatters to understand more about the process too.
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Rootschatter Brummygirl was working on this idea for Birmingham way back in 2010.
http://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=448776.msg3109708#msg3109708
I wonder how far she's got?
http://www.ancestorsofbirmingham.com/gro_index.htm
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The order is Anglican, Jewish, Quaker, (or Quaker, Jewish) registrar attended (for other denominations and RC) and then register office.
I extracted Dec 1/4 1874 and put the names and numbers into a spreadsheet and then sorted by page number. The range runs from 1-328
Like many databases, the GOONS marriage locator is a volunteer project and I suggest it is far from complete.
From the sorted data the sequence for 1874 runs
Benwell St James
Byker St Anthony
Byker St Michael
Elswick St Stephen
Elswick St Paul
Jesmond Clayton
N/C All Saints
N/C St Andrew
N/C St Ann
N/C Christchurch
N/C St John Baptist
N/C St John
N/C St Nicholas cathedral
N/C St Peter
Elswick St Phillip
The 1868 National Gazetteer on Genuki (http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/NBL/Newcastle/Gaz1868) lists the churches at that time as
"nine churches, besides numerous chapels. The livings are, St. Nicholas, St. Andrew's, St. John the Baptist's, All Saints', St. Peter's, St. Ann's, also St. Paul's and the new church at Byker, St. Thomas's, and St. Mary the Virgin's, in the corporation of Newcastle. "
plus townships in the townships of Byker, Elswick, Heaton, Jesmond, and Westgate which would also have had churches.
"The Roman Catholics have a church dedicated to St. Mary, which was erected in 1843. There are besides about 30 places of worship belonging to Dissenting congregations, including Wesleyan, Association, Primitive and New Connexion Methodists, Independents, Baptists, English, Scotch, United and Reformed Presbyterians, Scotch Kirk, Free Church, Unitarians, Glassites, Society of Friends, Swedenborgians, and Jews.
Referring back to the list of parishes in sequence, it is not complete.
Without someone going through all the registers at the register office and noting where the quarters start and stop, this will always be a work in progress.
It may be easier to work through the Anglican registers deposited at the archives but those of the Society of Friends, the Jewish records from the Synagogue and the registers from the register office may never be included.
Without further data, my Anglican list stops at page 185. That's not to say though that there aren't Anglican marriages after this number, I just don't have the records online to check.
At this time, the only way to know where the marriage took place is to order the cert.
It's a shame that marriage registers will not form part of the new GRO Index project as we now have with births and deaths.
If you can get hold of a copy, Michael Whitfield Foster's Comedy of Errors, it will prove most enlightening as to how the indexes were historically compiled and the errors and omissions caused as a result of late submissions by the Anglican clergy and the problems of reading their handwriting added to a very manual and labour-intensive system of indexing in pre-computer days.
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If you can get hold of a copy, Michael Whitfield Foster's Comedy of Errors, it will prove most enlightening as to how the indexes were historically compiled and the errors and omissions caused as a result of late submissions by the Anglican clergy and the problems of reading their handwriting added to a very manual and labour-intensive system of indexing in pre-computer days.
See http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/mikefost/
Stan
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Thanks Slow Gin for posting the links which look really interesting and also thanks dawnsh for all the information which is very helpful for my understanding concerning this topic.
Even though the website is still very much a work in progress I am very pleased with the success I have had with it so far in being able to pin point several Church marriages which I am after in the Newcastle registration district. I also found one which only pinpoints a register office which at least has saved me some time in looking for it on microfilm.
This is a strange one though .. don't quite know what to make of it. This relates to an ancestor called Mary Ann Conroy who married a Thomas Nichol in 1897 September quarter 10b page 601 Morpeth. The website gives a message saying that this entry is between entries for Bellingham and Alnwick but these are separate registration districts in themselves. I would have thought this record would have appeared between Sub-district areas of Morpeth. ???
This side of my family was Roman Catholic but for some reason sometimes also dabbled with C of E Churches. When Mary Ann was widowed she married again to a Cuthbert Saint. I do know that this second marriage was at a registry office.
It is fascinating to know how these indexes can be worked out even though it does seem a bit of a complicated process.
I do wonder how Brummygirl got on too. Good on her for doing all that work which will no doubt be of benefit now and in the future to countless people. :)
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Thanks for posting this link Stan. I will read this later today - just on way home from work so will looking forward to reading this later on. :)
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This is a strange one though .. don't quite know what to make of it. This relates to an ancestor called Mary Ann Conroy who married a Thomas Nichol in 1897 September quarter 10b page 601 Morpeth. The website gives a message saying that this entry is between entries for Bellingham and Alnwick but these are separate registration districts in themselves. I would have thought this record would have appeared between Sub-district areas of Morpeth. ???
This side of my family was Roman Catholic but for some reason sometimes also dabbled with C of E Churches. When Mary Ann was widowed she married again to a Cuthbert Saint. I do know that this second marriage was at a registry office.
freebmd also has a lot of information behind the scenes
You can look at their page ranges for the year and quarter
https://www.freebmd.org.uk/cgi/district-page-map.pl?file=1897M1.csv%201897M2.csv%201897M3.csv%201897M4.csv
Sep 10b 547-605 Morpeth
Sep 10b 607-634 Alnwick
The entry you are looking for is 601 which is at the top end of the Morpeth range suggesting it was most probably a register office marriage (or RC registrar attended) which is why the marriage locator gives you the error message, they just don't have specific data to give you an exact place.
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Thank you for this dawnsh. This is something new to me. How would I get to such behind the scenes information from the home page on freebmd?
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No it is alright, I have found out to do this myself. You learn something new on here every day. ;D Thanks again dawnsh.
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This is an excellent thread
JM
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Have you been having some success with this website too majm? :)
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I tink JM was locating the thread to help me on another thread :)
Add - this one:
https://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=805671.0
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Oh I see. ;D
I was hoping he had had as much success as I have with this.