U.S. and International, 1340 - 1980 Marriage Records

This data set will save you weeks of research time. It contains marriage record information for approximately 1,400,000 individuals from across all 50 United States and 32 different countries around the world. These records, which include information on over 500 years of marriages, were extracted from family group sheets, electronic databases, biographies, wills, and other sources. Compiled over thirty-four years by professional genealogist Bill Yates, these marriage records are unique because they were taken from a wide array of sources and stand to provide a great deal of information about entire families.

Source materials for these marriage records include family group sheets, pedigree charts, family history articles, queries, letters, Bible records, wills, and manuscript genealogies. Researching with this unique data set, you may be able to learn the full names of the bride and groom, their birth dates, the year and/or month they were married, and the marriage location. One of the most useful features of this collection is that once you find an ancestor in this data set, you have the opportunity to quickly and easily obtain a great deal more information about that individual by contacting Yates Publishing. Please see the section of this introduction called "Ordering Additional Information" for more information.

The marriage records in this data set were provided by Yates Publishing. Yates Publishing has been publishing genealogical books, periodicals, and quarterlies since 1972. In 1981, the founder, Bill Yates, began a service to provide and collect the family history information in family group sheets. Called the Family Group Sheet Exchange, this service has collected over 200,000 pages of family group sheets on paper and several hundred thousand more on disk. For more information or to order an original Family Group Sheet on the Family Group Sheet Exchange, please write to: Bill Yates, Yates Publishing, P.O. Box 67, Stevensville, MT, 59870. Or contact him toll-free at 888-377-3797 or via e-mail at wyates@montana.com.

More About this Data Set

Before using this data set, you should be aware of the following: The records in this data set provide marriage record information for individuals from across the United States and around the world. Once you find an ancestor's name in the index, you will be able to access more information about the individual by contacting Yates Publishing. When you find an ancestor in the index, click the More About button on the bottom of the screen to go to the More About dialog box. In the More About box, you will learn additional information not only your about ancestor (such as marriage location and birth location) but about the original source as well. The materials included in this data set have been collected from a number of original sources. Because of this, the abbreviations used to note birth and marriage locations are not consistent throughout the data. While all of the location codes have been truncated, or shortened, to two letters, they have not all been truncated to the same two letters. While locations were sometimes truncated to known abbreviations (such as "TX" for Texas), other times they were simply shortened to the first two letters of the word. Thus, the abbreviation "NE," for example, could mean New York, Nebraska, or the Netherlands. Similarly, more than one abbreviation could be used to note the same location. For example, both "PO" and "PT" could be abbreviations for Portugal. Therefore, Genealogy.com recommends caution in making assumptions about locations based on these codes. We recommend ordering a copy of the original family group sheet from Yates Publishing to confirm the full name of the location. The following is a list of generally standard abbreviations: