Some Non-Conformist Marriages in surrounding counties to Leicestershire – CD 154

Description

Finding marriages of nonconformists after the start of Civil Registration has never been easy. Some registers are in County Record Offices, but many are not. Below is an account of the history of marriage registers after 1837 to try to explain the reasons for this.

At the start of Civil Registration in July 1837, marriage registers were issued to only the Anglican, Quaker and Jewish places of worship. Any non-conformist places of worship (e.g., Baptist, Congregational, Independent, Methodist, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic) were not allowed to register. If a marriage was performed at any of these registered places of worship, then the Registrar for the District had to be present to record the marriage in his Register and issue the certificate. As a result, any non-conformist marriage from that date was only entered into the Registrar’s marriage register. Unlike church registers, of which two duplicate books were issued, the Registrars completed only one book, which they kept. This book was also used for Register Office marriages. As such, details of marriages in these registers are only available by ordering a certificate from GRO or District Registration Offices.

This continued until 1898, when an Act of Parliament was passed allowing non-conformist places of worship to appoint an Authorised Person and have their own pair of duplicate registers. Many took up this option, but some continued to use the Registrar as before, especially in cases where marriages at the place of worship were few.

When marriage registers were complete, one of the duplicate copies was sent to the  Superintendent Registrar of that District for their records, and the other was the church’s copy. Due to space considerations in the safes at the churches, a good proportion of these eventually found their way to the County Record Offices as the official Diocese storage facility. Most Anglican marriage registers are there, and from 1899, some non-conformist registers are there. However, many of the latter chose to retain their copy of the register. Hence, details of those marriages are not readily available, and the GRO index gives no clues as to which these marriages are.

I have compiled the dates and places of some of these non-conformist marriages, including Register Office marriages, from newspaper marriage columns, World War 1 soldiers’ records, original church registers, and other sources.

They are available here in searchable indexes for each County by date, groom, and bride. I have combined them with the General Register Office volume and page number for that marriage, taken from FreeBMD. If differences occurred in name spellings, I have generally used the FreeBMD one unless I could prove otherwise. This also acts as a check that the marriage was a valid one. A notes column shows where many of the participants of some of these marriages were from, if in Leicestershire. There are over 63,000 marriages in the index. A few marriages are shown in more than one county if the marriage was in more than one county newspaper. Although the index says it goes up to 1920, some counties go further with marriages, even up to 1960.

The newspapers sourced were from the British Newspaper Archives on Findmypast.

Sometimes, newspaper marriage entries provide further details, such as the father’s name, address, town or village, or occupation, but these are beyond the scope of this index. Searches can be made in the relevant County newspapers around the marriage date. ( for further details regarding the newspapers please more information on the actual CD)