Marriage & Searching For Women Ancestors

As was talked about in the entry on the censuses(eses) finding women ancestors can be difficult.

In future years working with women will be easier as more documentation is released in our modern society, but for the time-frame we generally deal with in genealogy (born +110 years ago) women weren't allowed to vote or own property for the majority of the world's existence and across the majority of the world's geography.  Additionally, their names changed with their marriages.  So on your family research fully one-half of your research is going to involve searching for people whose names changed at some point and there isn't always a record of when or where it happened or what it got changed to. This makes finding women particularly difficult in many instances.

Make sure you get my mustache in the center....

Historically, marriage was more than just a religious institution or a matter of love but a means for economic and temporal survival.  Even more often, marriage was a means of conveying land, preserving titles and family lines and this varied from culture to culture.  Marriage was very often a matter of function more than love.

The marriage of a younger woman to an older man was the norm in an age gone by as by then the man would have established himself and have a means to provide for his new wife and her youthfulness made her physically able to bear children and care for him in his older age.  It wasn't uncommon for an ailing veteran in his very last years to marry a girl of fifteen or so in order to give her his pension for the remainder of her life in order for him to be cared for in his dying days.  She would then re-marry and bring the pension with her into a new marriage.

Further complicating things is the issue that women married more than once very often.  Two and three marriages aren't unusual with harsh frontier lives.  Meanwhile death in childbirth would often leave men widowers with children later with step-mothers and the husband married multiple times.

Meanwhile, many censuses wouldn't record the names of anyone but the head of the household or there may have been a common-law marriage in various frontiers and so there may not have been a record of the marriage with relatives seemingly "coming from nowhere."  As a bit of trivia the youngest marriage contracted in the Oregon Territory was at 3 years of age (Fact I learned at the Oregon Trail visitor's center).

In your genealogical research you'll find eras in world marriage history that make the 1980's look like eras of marital stability.

But what to do and how to find your women ancestors when their marriages aren't listed on censuses with their maiden names? 

One trick I've came up with works pretty well.  I knew for example that the marriage took place in Multnomah County, Oregon.  So I did a search of the Oregon Marriage index which doesn't always  list the groom and the bride together, but searched for just the bride under her maiden name and found the date she was married. 

Then I searched the index for *all* marriages on just that date in the same place (Multnomah County) and pulled out all the grooms names for that date and location.

Actually this couple almost looks happy

Then I searched for husband / wife combos under the married name until I found a document with the bride's first name and *a* husband off that list who was married that date.  I would correlate other info that I knew about the wife to see if that was indeed them, and would come up with *the* match I was looking for.

Previously what had been a dead-end was suddenly turning up names left and right and yielding a lot of fruit.

Later I found the bride marrying again under her married name and was able to find a second marriage which led me to the death of the first husband, and then her headstone with this info and then her obituary off the headstone info and used that to find other family marriages and married names.

It's all about using info that will lead you to other sources of info.

Other documents that will yield marriages are death certificates short of a marriage certificate, and newspapers often carried weddings depending on the era that you are working in, there are also wills, letters and stories if you can find them.  If you're working backwards, obituaries carry a lot of info.  Cemeteries and headstones will often have a maiden name in them for you to try searching by.

Additionally, middle-names can yield clues as to a matriarchal lineage as daughters often would be named after their grandmother or have their mothers first name as a middle name.

Becoming proficient at this will yield a lot of results but the key is to not get too hung up on a difficult line, keep learning, and be persistent and patient.  Don't forget to pray!

For more info on how to research women in genealogy - click here.