Marriage Locator Principles Marriage Locator Principles It is useful to know how marriages were (and are) indexed by the General Register Office (GRO) for England and Wales. At the end of each quarter, the incumbent, or the parish clerk, would copy out the entries in the Marriage Register for that quarter and send these as a “quarterly return” to the local Registrar’s Office. The Registrar would then assemble these together for all the sub-districts and forward them to the GRO for indexing. At the GRO, clerks would place each set of quarterly returns into the appropriate “volume” for the Registration District where the church belonged, and construct the Index. They were rigorous in their methods, but with some understandable quirks that you’d expect from a manual system. Note, by the way, that this means the GRO Index is based on a copy, and that this also applies to certificates issued by the GRO – only the Marriage Register has the original data. The GRO clerks placed the churches in their volume in a regular sequence (although this could and did change over time), and the marriages were always entered in chronological order. Each quarterly return for a church would always be entered beginning on a new right-hand page within the volume, which means that the first marriage in the quarter for that church would always be on an odd-numbered page. Quarterly returns that were submitted late would have to go somewhere else, and this accounts for page numbers with letters – 609c, 53a, and so on. This means that if a researcher has sufficient information about the entries in the index, then he or she can deduce from the page number within the volume which church submitted the return. This is the principle on which this Marriage Locator website is based. The ‘sufficient information’ required about the entries in the Index has been built up – and is still being built up – by a number of volunteers. Each chooses a Registration District to work on, and visits the County Record Office that most closely covers that Registration District (RD). For each of the churches within that RD, they take the following steps: First, identifying the earliest marriage in a quarter for a church, and noting down the names of the bride and groom. Doing the same for the last marriage in the quarter. Finally, using an online service, or FreeBMD, to find the page numbers where those two marriages have been indexed. These two page numbers, representing the first and last marriages in a quarter, are what have been termed the ‘Cardinal Points’ for that church. The consequence of this is that if you are presented with a GRO Index reference in that same quarter for a page number which is between those Cardinal Points, then the marriage must have taken place in that church, and the details can be found in the church’s Marriage Register. That means you don’t have to spend money to obtain a copy certificate from the GRO or the local Register Office; instead, you simply have to look up the original church Marriage Register in the County Record Office. Because this project started with a particular focus towards the East End of London, coverage was originally richest for the RDs of Stepney, Mile End, St George in the East, Whitechapel, and Shoreditch for the years 1837 to 1911. However, our volunteers have contributed plentiful data from other areas and other years, often representing a full set of Cardinal Points for additional Registration Districts. For other areas, coverage can still be patchy … but is increasing, as can be seen from the number of entries given on each search result. Return to the Marriage Locator search page.