Tag Archives: marriage bonds

Making 1797-1850 Marriage Records Available Online

This week a patron from St. Louis came into the Library Special Collections Reading Room looking for documentation relating to his ancestors’ 1809 marriage in Warren County.  He had already been to the courthouse, where he was told that Special Collections had many of the original Warren County marriage bonds from 1797 to around 1850.  I was thrilled to be able to help him, because he was our first in-house patron to use the scanned Warren County Marriage Records online in TopSCHOLAR.  Rather than pulling out the vulnerable originals, I was able to guide him through the search process of finding the record online.  The marriage records have been scanned in the same order they appear in the collection, which is first arranged chronologically by year and then alphabetically by the gro0m’s last name.   If you don’t know the groom’s name, then you can do a keyword search by the bride’s maiden name by using the search box that appears in the top left corner of the page.  At this time, we only have the first fifteen years online.  We are adding new records incrementally as we complete the scanning and encoding.

Marriage bond.

An original Warren County marriage document from 1797.

Scanning these records and making them accessible is a time consuming and expensive process.  Personnel in Manuscripts & Folklife Archives will make tremendous progress on the project this summer, as we have a student and one part-time employee committed almost exclusively to the project.  The funding for their wages was made possible through a challenge grant made by Marilyn Forney, a friend of Special Collections from Pennsylvania but with local family ties.  Her grant was matched by members of the XV Club, Ray Buckberry, Tad Donnelly, Dean Connie Foster, and Jonathan Jeffrey.

The marriage records are our most requested resource both in-house and online.  This digitization project will not only make the items accessible to the public in the comfort of their homes, it will help save the documents by decreasing human handling.  To peruse the records scanned thus far click here.

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“Dearly Beloved. . .”

Bride Mildred Tucker, 1925

Bride Mildred Tucker, 1925

Summer is wedding season, and the collections of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives section of WKU’s Department of Library Special Collections provide evidence of the pomp and circumstance, excitement and humor with which Kentuckians have tied the knot through history.

To begin with, our collection of more than 7,000 Warren County, Kentucky marriage bonds begins in 1797 and is a gold mine for those researching family history.  In addition, many collections of family papers, such as the Margie Helm Collection, contain wedding invitations and announcements.  Other collections document the unusual; for example, a double wedding that took place inside Mammoth Cave in 1879, inaugurating a custom that lasted until 1941.  Photographs, such as Mildred Tucker‘s before her 1925 wedding, are indispensable to the occasion.  In particular, many a local bride proudly posed in a creation made by the celebrated Bowling Green dressmaker Mrs. A. H. (Carrie) Taylor.

And, of course, there are the diaries and letters of both participants and observers recalling the triumphs and tribulations of the big day.  “This is Birdie’s wedding day,” wrote Russellville’s Fannie Morton Bryan on February 27, 1889.  “Lena and Joe Gill and Mot Williams and myself stood up with them.  That is as near married as I ever expect to be.”  (She was right).  Amid a whirlwind of preparations for her February 16, 1926 wedding, Bowling Green’s Mildred Potter and her mother addressed the “burning question” of attire for the men in the party.  “Agonizing” over cutaways or tuxedos, they settled on “gray trousers and cutaways, with spats,” but a stressed-out Mildred “shed a few tears” when a telegram arrived from her fiance in New York that betrayed his misunderstanding of her diktat.

Marriage of Margie Helm's parents, 1888

Marriage of Margie Helm’s parents, 1888

Some enjoy scrutinizing a wedding and judging it against their own ideal.  Writing to his cousin in 1861, Charles Edmunds of Princeton described the curious ceremony of his family’s domestic servant.  “Mother’s house girl Vic was married,” he reported.  “An old negro preacher officiated, and he made the man promise to do a thing I never heard of before. . . he turned to the man and said, ‘Richard Calvert, do you promise to take this woman to be your lawful wife and be unto her a kind, loving and obedient husband’; if I had been his place I would not have agreed to that because I think that if ever I get married, my wife will have to obey me, and not I obey her, but he assented, and the ceremony was performed, and they were made man and wife upon those terms.”

Search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat for more of our collections that feature weddings.

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