Marriage Certificates in Scotland

You may have a forebear's marriage certificate among family papers. Perhaps you have taken the parents' date and place of marriage from a birth certificate, and have obtained the corresponding marriage certificate. The image beneath shows an imaginary example containing the columns you would expect and the kind of information you would encounter in an older marriage certificate (apart from the silly names!).

Note that this certificate follows on (as it were) from the imaginary birth certificate illustrated on the Birth Certificates in Scotland page.

Here are a few points to note about this certificate and marriage certificates in general:

• The first column contains a number. This is a running number for the certificate in the original volume for marriages registered in that district, in that year.

• In the second column, the word "publication" means "publication of intention to marry", where such intention was read from the pulpit of a church, or published in a prominent place in a registry office. Occasionally, instead of this, there could be a note to the effect that a warrant was acquired from the sheriff substitute of the county.

• The age of each party (in column four) is obviously a key fact. By subtracting this from the marriage year, you should have a fairly accurate year of birth for each. Armed with this information and the names of parents, you can then search indexes to find the birth records of each party.

• Just as important is the address information in column five, particularly if the marriage date is near to a census year. You may well find the parental families at those addresses on the census nearest in time to the marriage date.

• In column six it was standard practice to insert the word "deceased" if a parent of the bride or groom was deceased at the time of the marriage. It is normally (but not always) a safe assumption to make that if the word "deceased" is not there, then the parent was still alive. This information helps when tracing death certificates.

• The witnesses in column seven (usually the best-man and the bridesmaid) were sometimes relatives. Here, for example, Stephen Thirdname could be a cousin of Ann Othername. He was obviously friendly with Robin Somebody, and that may have been how the bride and groom met!

You may now want to go to the Death Certificates page.

• Click here to find out where to obtain Scottish Birth, Marriage and Death certificates, or the information from them.