New York City Marriage License Index



nyc-marriagesThe data was provided to the not-for-profit activist group ‘Reclaim the Records’ by the New York City Clerk’s Office.  It has made digital thousands of the NYC marriage licenses, and, as a searchable index, available on their website, free to search. The marriage licenses index in this data set have about 3,124,595 licenses, doubling which means a little over six million people (bride and groom) represented. It covers the years 1950 to 1995. There are 28,000 to 30,000 missing records for Manhattan for 1967 and few other small patches of missing records.

nyc-wedding-nixon-1968As you search the site it does recognize soundalike surnames, spelling variants, wildcards (with no minimum number of letters needed), common nicknames, year ranges, NYC borough preferences, but you still need to be aware of misspellings and variations of spellings in your search.

Scroll down the homepage and you will see the search data for marriage records for 1908 to 1929 and 1930 to 1995.

In doing a search with the boxes for 1950 to 1995, place what info you know, especially the surname. If you don’t know a given name, place a star *. If you don’t the search will have the default name in there. You will then see a list matching the names provided. Look to the far right, if the marriage was 50 years or longer, you have access to it (a public document). If less than 50 years, it is restricted. However, note this is an index – not the full printed record. If you didn’t know a marriage date or dull names of the bride and groom, it can be of great help. Also, it will give a variation of a name, maybe a form you didn’t know of. When the marriage is older than 50 years you can order a complete copy of the record.  

It is worth checking out. You might have had an ancestor marry in NYC.

Photos: NYC weddings of Nixon & Eisenhower in 1968 in NYC and Trump and Maples in 1993 in NYC.

Related FamilyTree.com genealogy blogs:

Details Missed in Wedding Records

Early NYC Marriage Records

New York Records

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