GOONS-L Archives
Archiver > GOONS > 2010-11 > 1289148744
From: "Debbie Kennett" <>
Subject: [G] Marriage challenges
Date: Sun, 7 Nov 2010 16:52:24 -0000
References: <SNT123-W41B8C636713FCF6298BDA4D04A0@phx.gbl>,<AANLkTik655REDen8CobqjUd7g+FVKk2Zbj7prwK27eEm@mail.gmail.com><SNT123-W1313C37457E08BB6BD0615D04A0@phx.gbl>,<00b201cb7b41$4c382630$4101a8c0@MollyPolly><SNT123-W6380D8273EB2C3DFB31A38D04A0@phx.gbl><963DCA9D76C34CD98F02B4E4F0F0EBD0@julief20dec08><590FF5F2A6624EB48CC0F54487B32528@NEWGAMES><ADFA18EEC85C4D929E0C12DB45C24626@julief20dec08>
In-Reply-To: <ADFA18EEC85C4D929E0C12DB45C24626@julief20dec08>
Julie
For you and also for the benefit of any other new members here is a quick
initiation into how to partake in Guild Marriage Challenges for England and
Wales. At one time it used to be months or even years of work to extract all
the marriage entries for a particular surname from the indexes. Now it can
be done in about half an hour.
Go to the FreeBMD website:
http://www.freebmd.org.uk/
Go to search and put in the name Frame. Set the dates to cover Sep 1837 to
Dec 1911, which is the period covered by Marriage Challenges. Once all the
marriages have been found click on the Download button and save the file to
your hard drive. Open the file, select all and then copy the contents into
an Excel spreadsheet. You might need to spend a little bit of time tidying
up the columns and deleting unnecessary information.
Then have a look at the Marriage Challenges page in the Members' Room:
http://www.one-name.org/members/mchallenge.html
If you have any marriages in the registration districts which are currently
being covered you simply need to send the person the appropriate information
from your spreadsheet. There is a form in the Members' Room which you will
need to download to enter your marriage details. You'll need to juggle your
marriage data a little bit to match it to the preferred format but it
shouldn't take too long to do. Once you've submitted your marriages, you
will then eventually get back either faux marriage certificates by e-mail,
handwritten faux certificates in the post or an Excel spreadsheet of the
results depending on the preferences of the person doing the challenge. You
will be receiving the same information that you would receive if you paid £9
to order a marriage certificate from the General Register Office. Some of
the registration districts where Frame marriages occurred have already been
covered in a Marriage Challenge but there are sometimes repeat Marriage
Challenges for the benefit of new members. You can see an example of some
faux Guild marriage certificates here which will also show you the
information provided on English marriage certificates from that time:
http://tinyurl.com/2uu8heg
You can then use your marriage spreadsheet as an index to keep track of
which certificates you have and which ones have been allocated to trees.
You can also extract later marriages from FreeBMD up to about 1940 but
coverage of the later years is not complete so you would need to check the
coverage charts on their website. You might also want to repeat the exercise
to add any relevant variant spellings. All the England and Wales BMDs are
also indexed on both Ancestry and FindMyPast from 1837 through to 2005, but
you would need a subscription to access these indexes.
Once you have some data from English records you will have the carrot to
attract enquiries from English researchers who are investigating those
lines. With so few English marriages I suspect it will turn out that all
your English lines originated in Scotland.
Debbie Kennett
This thread: