Tuesday's Tip: Research in the Michigan Marriage Records, 1867-1952

The record collection for Michigan Marriage Records, 1867-1952 is one of my favorite record collections.  It is online at Ancestry.com with 15,032,934 name indexed entries.  Note that this is a collection of marriage certificate digital images filed between 1867 and 1952.

The original source for this online collection is the Michigan, Marriage Records, 1867–1952. Michigan Department of Community Health, Division for Vital Records and Health Statistics.


On Ancestry.com, the user will find this collection search page in the Card Catalog:

The description of the information in this record collection is (from the Ancestry.com collection page):

This collection contains marriage registers (1868-1925) as well as licenses and certificates (1926-1952) from the state of Michigan. In some cases, marriages prior to 1868 may have been recorded in a later register and may be found in this collection. Marriage records are particularly valuable documents because they often provide much more than names of the bride and groom and a marriage date. While forms differ, you may find the following details among the records:

• name
• residence
• spouse
• marriage date and place
• race/color
• age
• occupation
• witnesses
• father’s name
• mother’s name

Due to privacy laws, images are only available for records that are more than 75 years old.

I searched for Seaver as a last name, checked the Exact box, and saw 162 results:

I clicked on the first match, and saw the information extracted for the marriage of Seth Seaver and Alice Ohman:

As you can see, this record summary provides the person's name, gender, race, age, birth year, birth place, license county, marriage date, marriage place, residence place, father's name, mother's name, spouse's name, county file name, and state file number.  The user can click on the spouse's name to see that person's information.

Plus, there is an image of the marriage record with even more information (two screens):

The "prizes" on these records are the names, birth places, father's names, mother's names, occupation, marriage date, marriage place, and witnesses.  

For my key surnames, this collection has these numbers of exact records:

*  Seaver:      162
*  Seavers:       15
*  Seever:          8
*  Seevers:      39
*  Sever:          61
*  Severs:        44
*  Sevier:        17

*  Carringer:     6

*  Auble:         52

*  Vaux:          10

The Ancestry "database number" for this collection is 9093.  I have over 420 profiles in my Ancestry Family Tree with a pending Hint in this collection.  I know that I have collected some of the entries already.

More information about Michigan Vital Records can be found at   https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/Michigan_Vital_Records.

Indexed Michigan Marriage Record collections on FamilySearch are at   https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/list/?cqs=michigan%20marriages.

Indexed Michigan Marriage Record collections on Ancestry are at
https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/catalog/?title=michigan%20marriage.

                                =============================================

NOTE:  Tuesday's Tips is a genealogy blog meme intended to provide information about a resource helpful to genealogists and family historians, especially in the U.S. online genea-world.

The URL for this post is:  https://www.geneamusings.com/2020/03/tuesdays-tip-research-in-michigan.html

Copyright (c) 2020, 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.  Share it on Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest using the icons below.  Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com.