Undertaking a marriage challenge is one of the services that members of the Guild of One Name Studies provide to each other. A member volunteers to look up the details of specific marriages in the parish registers within a registration district. This can really help when you have identified a marriage of interest on a site such as FreeBMD and would love to have the extra details that the parish marriage register contains.
These might include: age, status, address and occupation of the bridal couple, the date of the wedding, fathers’ names and occupations, witnesses names.
It can get very expensive to buy all the certificates for a one name study and the archive holding the parish registers you need may be too far to travel for you to do the research yourself, so a helping hand from another member is very welcome.
This is will my first marriage challenge and I am looking forward to finding out what members would like researched. If you are a GOONS member but you haven’t done this before either, this is how is works:
Requests to hunnisett@one-name.org. Deadline for Requests: 25 Apr 2019
Requests using the standard Excel template much preferred. This is to be found under Guild Services/Marriage Challenge on the Guild website. I will accept other formats but please provide
· Year
· Quarter (please use 1, 2, 3, 4 – this makes it sortable by date. Do not add Q; do not use month names)
· Surname (please use UPPER CASE)
· First Names (please use Mixed Case)
· GRO Volume Number
· GRO Page Number
Requests to hunnisett@one-name.org.
N.B. Any entries already on Ancestry or FindMyPast, will not be researched, so please check beforehand if at all possible. Warwickshire marriages are in the process of being transcribed by both organisations but date ranges vary, some parishes are missing and some entries are banns rather than marriages. The 3 Anglican churches in Stratford upon Avon itself are not covered by either.
