The recent Royal wedding was just the first of many weddings that will take place this wedding season. Spring and summer are popular times to get married, and chances are that you may be invited to attend one or more weddings for friends and family this year. Of course I must add that around here, wedding season stretches into autumn because the natural beauty of our fall foliage along with mostly pleasant weather creates a breathtaking setting for outdoor weddings.
If you are your family’s genealogy expert, you may already be focusing on adding the details of upcoming nuptials to your family history research notes and family tree chart. With weddings on your mind, you may also be reflecting on details of past weddings in your family – details that you may not have been able to track down yet. Ancestry.com has many resources that can help you find information about marriages. Perhaps you have already looked at some of those resources, such as the census records, newspapers, and death records but you have come up empty handed.
There are more places that you can look, if you have not done so already. For example, before there were phone books, there were city guides and gazetteers. These public records listed the residents of an area plus, oddly enough, indicated which ones were widows and provided their deceased husbands’ names. If you have ancestors that served in the armed forces, their draft card may hold clues to their marital status at the time that they enlisted, as well as whether they had any minor children at the time. Ancestry.com has these two resources plus others that can help you to continue your research and track down the elusive details of the marriages (and divorces) that your ancestors may or may not have intentionally hidden from the inquisitive eyes of future generations.
Photo by sullivan on morguefile.com.