Tuesday, September 29, 2020

Tuesday's Tip - Check Out the Ancestry.com "Newspapers.com Marriage Index, 1800-1999" Collection

 Ancestry.com added the "Newspapers.com Marriage Index, 1800s-1999" record collection on 14 September 2020.  They have created an index for marriage notices and records in the Newspapers.com collection of thousands of newspapers.  The Ancestry Card Catalog indicates that there are 11,436,408 entries in this collection.  Thast sounds like a lot, but there are over 835,000,000 in the similar Ancestry index for "Newspapers.com Obituaries, 1800- Current" collection. 

On the search page for this record collection, I entered an exact surname of "seaver":


I could have searched for a given name, a "lived in" location, a marriage year or location, with family members (father, mother, sibling, spouse) but I want to see how many Seaver matches there are.

After clicking on the orange "Search" button, I had 186 matches:

The results list shows the name, publication date, publication place, and spouse's name.

I looked in my RootsMagic database, and did not have Mary E. Nevin in my family tree, but I did have William H. Seaver of Woodstock, Vt. in my tree.  Here is the record summary:


The summary provides the name, the spouse's name, the gender, the residence place, the marriage date and the marriage place.  

Here is the actual article  with their wedding announcement published in the Arizona Daily Star {Tucson, Ariz.] dated 25 March 1947:

I added the bride's name and the marriage information to my RootsMagic family tree.  Now I have 185 more to check out.

Here's a source citation for this marriage using the RootsMagic template for a "Newspaper, Online image:":

"Wedding Held Saturday at St. Philips," wedding announcement, Arizona [Tucson, AZ] Daily Star, Tuesday, 25 March 1947, page 7, column 1, announcement of wedding of William H. Seaver and Mary E. Nevin, 22 March 1947; Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com : accessed 28 September 2020).

This is an excellent opportunity to search for marriages of 19th and 20th century people in your family tree that may not have been recorded in available vital records.

There is no indication as to how complete this index of the Newspapers.com collection is - does it index ALL of the newspapers in the Newspapers.com collection?

Of course, the newspapers have to be in the Newspapers.com collection, and Ancestry.com has to have an accurate index, in order to find these marriage announcements.  

If I ever run out of Obituaries for my "Seavers in the News" theme on Thursdays, here is another great newspaper collection to mine for marriage records.

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Disclosure:  I have a complimentary subscription to Ancestry.com and to Newspapers.com and have used them extensively to find articles about my ancestral and one-name families.

Copyright (c) 2020, Randall J. Seaver

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1 comment:

Bill said...

Randy-

Thanks for the data on this new collection. The beta on the obituary collection has been extremely helpful in getting accurate parent, sibling and children's information, including married names of daughters and sisters and birth names of mothers.

Any theories on why there are so many fewer marriage than obituary records? For my direct ancestors, I've been able to find an equal share of both types going back 150 years in local papers via Newspapers.com. Seems strange that there's almost a two order of magnitude difference in what Ancestry's system has been able to unearth.

Bill Greggs
bgreggs@gmail.com