Ancestry.com Adds California Marriage Index, 1949-1959 to their Collections

I was pleasantly surprised to see the California Marriage Index, 1949 to 1959, added to the Recently Added or Updated Collections list at Ancestry.com this morning.

The "About this collection" article says:

This index to marriage records from the state of California covers the years 1949–1959. Details in the index include:

• groom’s name
• bride’s name
• bride and groom’s ages
• marriage date
• marriage county
• state file number

The actual marriage record will contain even more details, such as residence, birth information, occupation, and parents’ names and birthplaces. To obtain copies of the entire record, the State of California Department of Health Services holds birth, marriage, death, and divorce records from July 1905. (For earlier records, write to the clerk of the county where the event was recorded.)

I always like to use my one-name-study surnames to get a quick look at a new database.  I entered "Seaver" as an exact last name in the search field:

I received 72 results (but half of them are the spouse's name because the marriage was entered twice - once for the groom and once for the bride):

I clicked on the first entry and saw the record summary:

The record summary includes:

*  Name
*  Gender
*  Estimated Birth Year (from age)
*  Age
*  Marriage Date
*  Marriage Place (only the County)
*  Spouse's Name
*  Spouse's Age

The record is an alphabetical listing for the year found in the search results:

The screen above is for 1952, and there are six entries for "Seaver."

The columns are:

*  Name of Groom (Last, First, Middle Initial)
*  Name of Bride (Last, First, Middle Initial)
*  County (number representing each county or major cities)
*  Ages of Groom, Bride
*  Marriage Date (Month, Day, Year)
*  Marriage Recording Date (Month, Year)
*  Local File Number (County, Number)
*  State File Number
*  ??? (x denotes the same marriage, but a second entry - for previously married females, I think)

So I have some data mining to do in the next week or so to "collect" marriages and write source citations for Seaver, Carringer, Auble, McKnew, Leland, Schaffner, and several other surnames.

This database increases Ancestry's coverage of California Marriages to the years 1949 to 1985.  I know that the state has earlier and later marriage records, but they are not available online in searchable databases.  I wish they were!

These particular records have been available on the VitalSearch-CA.com website, a subscription site, for many years.  The user had to search through the index pages for each year to find a marriage of interest.  The Ancestry.com searchable index makes a significant dataset searchable for California researchers.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2013/08/ancestrycom-adds-california-marriage.html

copyright (c) 2013, Randall J. Seaver