Finding the spouse

If you are trying to find the other partner in a marriage for index entries, particularly before 1912, this page may be of help to you.

Information in the Indexes

From 1912 onwards the marriage entries in the index give the surname of the spouse. Prior to that the surname of the spouse is not in the indexes and FreeBMD has no access to the records that contain this information. So, if you have found the entry for one partner of a marriage prior to 1912 there are two ways in which you can find information about the spouse:

Obtain a marriage certificate from the GRO - see here for how to do that
Search FreeBMD for potential spouses by looking for people on the same page of the register (see below)

Searching FreeBMD for potential spouses

Prior to 1852, up to 4 marriages were entered on each page of the register. After that (with a few exceptions) there are two marriages per page. Each page of the register is identified by the District, Volume and Page.

FreeBMD provides a facility that makes use of this fact to help you narrow down the search for a spouse. The FreeBMD search results give the District, the register Volume (Vol column) and the Page (Page column) within that volume. If you click on the Page a search will be performed to show you all the entries on that page.

Hence the search could result in the names up to 8 or 4 people (depending on the year), and any 4 or 2 of these could be the spouse of the person you are interested in. There is no way, from the index, to tell which person is actually the spouse. If you have no other information to go on (e.g. cross referencing a Census) the only option is to buy the marriage certificate from the GRO.

Note that sometimes a page will be only partially completed, so there will be less than 4 or 8 (depending on the year) entries. The number of entries, should of course, always be even.

Failing to find the spouse

However, you might fail to find the name of a spouse on the same page for a number of reasons:

FreeBMD is still in the process of transcribing that quarter of the index. The percentage of the quarter transcribed is shown next to the heading for the quarter or you can look at the coverage of FreeBMD here
There is an error in the index
The entry was mistranscribed by FreeBMD
The page could not be accurately read on the scan used for the FreeBMD transcription

You may be able to find a spouse by performing a spouse search yourself using the information here; if you have other information about the entry, e.g. possible names, you can use this to refine such a search.

If you find the missing entry you are encouraged to submit a correction, if the entry has been mistranscribed, or add a Postem to the entry otherwise. Both of these are done from the information page for the entry which is accessed by clicking on the button next to the entry.

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