Help Needed To Understand 'Marriage Locator' Website

[River Tyne Lass]

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.

[stanmapstone]

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

[River Tyne Lass]

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.

[majm]

Excellent Question RTL

and

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.     

[River Tyne Lass]

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.

[majm]

Gold stars to avm    then 

[Jebber]

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.

[Finley 1]

just marking this thread   its a good un

xin

[avm228]

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