Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Mining the California, County Marriages, 1850-1952 Collection on FamilySearch

I have been mining the California, County Marriages, 1850-1952 historical record collection on FamilySearch during the last week or two.  There are 1,911,081 indexed entries, and 2,480,495 images in this collection.  The collection page says it is 99% complete, but I noted that it didn't have any marriage entries for San Diego County yet.  Significantly, it has marriage records from San Francisco, Los Angeles, Orange, Fresno and many other counties.


I have been mining this collection for Seaver persons.  I used the "Exact" check box and found 191 matches:


When I pick one at random, say the 4th one down the screen above, there is indexed information for the two marriage partners, including the marriage date and place, and, in this case from 1911, their ages and their parents names.

For many earlier marriages (before 1900), there are no parents listed.

For some later marriages, there are marriage record images provided, such as this one:


There is an image available in the right-hand side of the screen, so I clicked on that, and after increasing the zoom of the image, saw:



I did not have Charles Henry Seaver (born 1889 in Tennessee, son of James S. Seaver and Mary Lee) in my database.  I wanted to add the marriage, so I did, and added the parents names, but then a search on FamilySearch and Ancestry did not reveal a family with James S. Seaver/Sever and Mary Seaver/Sever as parents, although there are several Charles Henry Seaver (or Charles H. Seaver/Sever) persons born in Tennessee in the 1885-1895 time period.  So now I have another loose end in my database - but other records may surface in the future that will permit me to connect James S. Seaver/Sever to a set of parents.

I did have good luck today working through the next match on the list - a Doloris Seaver who married Elton Gray; her parents were identified as Paul E. Seaver and Barbara Maibach.  I was able to trace Paul Seaver's line back to Jacob and Esther (Croberger) Seaver/Sever.  I had not added family members for four Seaver families in that line previously.

There are still many more matches to look at just for the Seaver surname in this record collection.  I need to do the same thing with my other one-name surnames - Carringer, Vaux, Auble, and McKnew.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2015/09/mining-california-county-marriages-1850.html

Copyright (c) 2015, Randall J. Seaver


Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post.  Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com.


1 comment:

Jane said...

Randy, thanks for pointing out this collection! I was able to quickly find a marriage record I'd been looking for.