Witnesses to marriages

It was recently suggested that witnesses on marriage certificates can assist our searches of family history. However I have come to the conclusion that this doesn't always work. Copy images of London marriages produce so much information - full names, ages, fathers names and trades etc -so useful to when trying to ascertain the correct person - also if the participants were even literate- 'X' marks the spot in so many of my cases of mid Victorian marriages. But have you ever looked at the web screen as a whole and checked the details in all the marriages recorded there - how many have used the same witnesses - sometimes 3 out of 4 records on the same page bear the same names. Was there a reason for this? elopement, family arguments = on such a happy day you would expect the loving couple to want to be surrounded by friends or family, and not have strangers witness their nuptials.

 

It doesn't always work, and there are any number of reasons why a marriage might be witnessed by strangers. I have noticed that in a number of the marriage registers for my ancestors that, on a whole page, at least one of the witnesses was a church elder. Even in modern times things happen unexpectedly. A couple I knew in the 1970s went to the local registry office to enquire about getting married the following day, only to find that the local justice of the peace was leaving the next day and would be out of town for several weeks. They decided to be married there and then, and the witnesses to their marriage were the JP's clerk and the building janitor.

The names of witnesses can be helpful, though, in the older records, especially if the couple is from a small place. I have also found where two couples married the same day were witnesses for each other, but in the long ago and far away, where married women had no legal status, only their husbands would be allowed to "sign" the register. The other witness might be the above-mentioned church elder.

 

I started to look into what relationship witnesses would have to the the happy couple in the hopes they might have been relatives (however distant) so extending the family tree. However as I said previously the same persons appeared time after time which suggests they may possibly have been paid for the job - On closer inspection I found 2 persons ( John Abbott and Mary Tilsley (who couldn't even sign her name)) appear as witnesses on no less than 9 marriage records in the space of 2 months in 1853; subsequently I found a John Abbott was responsible for redeveloping an area of Bethnal Green at that time( the same man?) . Another set of witnesses followed a similar pattern of signing certificates over several months, however in this instance I believe the male was the Parish Clerk who would have received payment for his services - at baptisms it is recorded he received 3d. Further research is needed to see if this was a widespread practice as I have not found this repeated use of identical witnesses on Church records from more affluent areas of west London. I have limited my comments so far to marriages taking place in Church Of England churches in the Bethnal Green, Southwark, Bermondsey areas of London and carried out according to the Rights and Ceremonies of the Established church.

 

I do a lot of transcription work for Somerset FreeReg and see the same witnesses signing all the time. In some small rural villages few people could read or write so the parish clerk witnessed many ceremonies.