GRO indexes

[gloryer]

well you learn something new everyday. Just had an e-mail explaining a bit about the page numbers which may help work out which church a marriage took place in.



When they created the GRO index of marriages, Anglican churches were indexed first and theoretically in alphabetical order though not always so. These were followed by non-conformist and then register office marriages.

So getting the first marriage in April and the last marriage in June for this quarter in each Medway RD parish I could look up their GRO page number and make a list of page ranges.

Brompton, Old 713 to 722
Chatham St John Devine 733 to 740
Gillingham St Mark 723 to 723
Gillingham St Mary 743 to 755
Luton Christ Church 757 to 760
Rochester St Margaret 761 to 767
Rochester St Peter 775 to 776

So your marriage with a GRO 795 page number, looks like it will be non-conformist or register office

[KiteRunner]

Interesting, Gloryer. I never knew that!

[Phoenix]

In Norfolk, with its tiny parishes, marriages references for the same church are very often virtually identical year on year... though I would have thought it very time consuming, attempting to work out which church someone might have been married at without buying the certificate:D

[Anne in Carlisle]

But it would help if you wanted to get the marriage cert from the Register Office. I believe they find it difficult to find because they are indexed by church rather than page.

Anne

[Phoenix]

Gloria will correct me if I'm wrong, but I think what she has done is use City Ark to establish page number ranges for a particular quarter. The number of places available for marriages would continually alter during the Victorian period as new churches were built, while others may have burnt down etc. The page numbering cannot have been static over time when the populations of urban parishes were expanding, while rural ones were declining. To make an educated guess, you would have to be able to identify at least one and preferably more marriages in a quarter. (Having made an educated guess in the past when two men died in the same parish in the same quarter and ordered the wrong death certificate)

Having said that, if it is for a period fully transcribed on freebmd, then that would certainly help in narrowing a marriage down.

[Phoenix]

I've just checked a particular rd and quarter where I know a marriage was at a registry office. It looks as if over a quarter of the marriages in that area in 1877 were in a registry office!

[gloryer]

I did try to reply last night but couldnt access the site.
Yes the area that I was talking about is from the medwaycityark area so maybe that is how they have been able to work it out. As you say you would need some certificates already to be able to work out which pages were relevant to which churches. The one that I was searching for is in the 1000's so presumably a registry office. I did do a thorough search of the site and couldnt find the one that I was looking for so had to result to ordering the certificate to solve my curiousity.

[Uncle John]

I've just checked a particular rd and quarter where I know a marriage was at a registry office. It looks as if over a quarter of the marriages in that area in 1877 were in a registry office!

Or "registrar attended" perhaps. Marriages where either the church wasn't "registered for the solemnisation of marriages" or the officiating clergyman wasn't licensed to marry people in that church. These marriages would be recorded in the registrar's "travelling register".