The Office for the Registrar for Births, Marriages and Deaths announced they are digitising the marriage source documents from 1940 backwards and the first batch of these will be released in about 6-8 weeks.
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| The Director of this digitisation project |
The process was the copy of the church certificate was provided to the Registrar within one month of the marriage. It is from that document a transcription was made by the clerk. It is a copy of that transcription that we have previously bought as the marriage certificate.
Before the Registrar digitised the pre-1890 marriages it was a typewritten copy (of a copy); after the digitisation we got a digital copy of the clerk’s copy.
Now after this latest digitisation by the Department, we will receive a digital copy of an actual certificate with the signatures of the bride, groom and witnesses rather than the transcription we have been able to buy previously.
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| The actual signatures |
In some cases, the marriage source documents will be a number of pages, such as when the bride or groom was underage and needed parental consent, or in a case where someone was known by a different name to their birthname and filed out a statutory declaration to that effect. In one admittedly unusual case there were SEVEN source documents for the one marriage certificate (so if you have a Harold Lonsdale Robinson married in 1916 you will have hit the jackpot!)
Kudos to the department for listening and making this happen!!!!!
I know of a number of marriage source documents I will be purchasing as soon as they become available!!!!