U.S. and International Marriage Records, 1560-1900

This database contains marriage record information for approximately 1,400,000 individuals from across all 50 United States and 32 different countries around the world between 1560 and 1900. 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 database, you may be able to learn the full names of the bride and groom, their birth dates and places, 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 database, you have the opportunity to quickly and easily obtain a great deal more information about that individual by contacting Yates Publishing (see next paragraph).

The marriage records in this database 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 visit Yates Publishing.

Note: There are a few records in this database that precede 1560 and a few that succeed 1900. However, 1560 and 1900 are the earliest and latest years where there are a significant amount of marriage records included in the index. They are therefore the best years to use to represent the scope of this data set's date range.

The materials included in this database 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, Ancestry.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 country abbreviations:

AA AUSTRALIA
AU AUSTRIA
BA BAVARIA
BE BELGIUM
BM BERMUDA
BO BOHEMIA
PR BARBADOS
CN CANADA
CU CUBA
CZ CZECHOLSOLVAKIA
DN DENMARK
EG EGYPT
EN ENGLAND
FI FINLAND
FR FRANCE
GR GERMANY
HL HOLLAND
HG HUNGARY
IC ICELAND
IR IRELAND
IT ITALY
LX LUXEMBOURG
MX MEXICO
NO NORWAY
NS NOVA SCOTIA
NT NETHERLANDS
PL POLAND
PS PRUSSIA
PT PORTUGAL
RM ROMAINA
RS RUSSIA
SN SWEDEN
SP SPAIN
ST SCOTLAND
SZ SWITZERLAND
WL WALES
YG YUGOSLAVIA