The Marriage Locator

Cracking the code of the GRO Marriage Index

This website enables you to interpret the Marriage Index created by the General Register Office for England and Wales. By using it you can determine where your ancestors were married - not just which Registration District, but which church!

Family historians researching their ancestry in England and Wales can learn a lot from a marriage certificate, and the most common way to obtain one is to send for a GRO "copy certificate", quoting the reference (year, quarter, volume number and page) from the GRO Marriage Index. This will cost you, currently, a minimum of £9.25 per certificate.

However, if you know the Anglican Church in which the marriage took place, and the Church Marriage Register has been deposited (as most have been) in the local County Record Office, then you can go to the appropriate CRO and look at the actual Marriage Register that your ancestors signed. Or since many Church Registers are now available online, you may be able to find the entry - for free! - via genealogical websites such as FamilySearch, or the local Online Parish Clerk.

This is the purpose of this website: to deduce, from the year, quarter, volume number and page that you have acquired from the GRO indexes, where the marriage took place.

The functionality of this website has now been transfered to the main Guild of One Name Studies website - a link can be found at the bottom of any page

Search:

Year: Quarter: Volume: Page No.:

The Marriage-Locator Database currently contains 724,212 marriage-locator points
(of which 391,017 are 'cardinal points') in 1,431 Registration Districts.

This is still a work in progress, and not all the data needed for all marriages is yet available. New data is continually being added.