Victorian Marriages' Project

Suspended

The project has been publicised in Ancestors magazine (produced by the National Archives) and Local Populations Studies. This is the first in a series of “mini-projects” to be run by FACHRS.

What’s the issue with the registers?

A number of researchers have used the residence of brides and grooms at the time of their marriage (as stated in marriage registers). For example, Keith Snell used a sample of marriage registers from 1700 to 1837 to look at the extent to which villagers married outside their parish and, in some cases, how far afield they found marriage partners. Snell commented that “residence” could be as short as four weeks (the period required by law) and urged some caution in interpreting his figures. [1]  
Barry Reay has estimated that around 10-15 percent of “married” couples in the CEBs might not have been married in his three Kent study parishes. He based this on the difficulty in finding marriages for local couples living together at the 1851 census.
However, there is an underlying assumption that brides and grooms were married in the home parish of one of the parties and that no-one in nineteenth century Britain would ever dream of telling an untruth to enable them to get married somewhere else. This seems a little unlikely!

There are currently 12 volunteers researching an estimated 1,500 marriages but there are still room for more volunteers if anyone is interested and you don’t have to be a member of FACHRS to take part.
Unlike recent FACHRS projects, we do not need to cover the whole country. On the assumption that the average registration district provides around 50 marriages (but up to 300 if wholly urban) a few volunteers looking at one or more registration districts would make a big difference to the validity of the results.
The likely outcome from the research is an article in Family and Community History rather than a book as we currently aim to achieve with our projects.

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