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Selected articles from the Newsletter

This article first appeared in SIGGNL 5  (May/June 1994)

Technical Development of some Marriage Indexes
based on material provided by Paul R. Joiner

Paul R. Joiner, Chairman of the Cleveland, North Yorkshire and South Durham Family History Society and a member of SIGG, figures on the pages of Jeremy Gibson's Guide for genealogists on marriage, census and other indexes for his work on indexes related to the areas covered by his society.  He has kindly provided us with some technical details of the marriage indexes on which he has been working since 1977.

Using Boyd's marriage index as a starting point, Mr Joiner decided first to fill in the gap for marriages in Northumberland and Durham from 1813 to the inception of general registration in 1837.  From here he extended back to add the parishes not covered by Boyd for 1800-1812, and also parishes in North Yorkshire for 1813-1837.  The indexes have provided evidence that there was a good deal of marriage across the Tees between these two areas.

Transcripts were made from the original registers, and details include surnames, abbreviated forenames, full dates and place of origin for any "strays" (i.e. from other parishes).  Any who were widows or widowers were noted.  Instead of the usual practice of recording each marriage on a separate slip, the Joiner indexes brought together all marriages of the same surname on one card.  This had the advantage of making it quicker to use, but involved additional work in sorting the entries for a final write-up.

At this stage Mr Joiner started using a computer, and put his indexes onto a database.  Moving from a BBC machine up to an Amstrad 1640 with twin drives, he was able to try different database programs, and eventually chose "Masterfile", mainly because of the provision of variable field lengths. This reduced requirements of storage space, but even so the index of over 40,000 marriages in all stretched over nine disks.  The next upgrade was to a much faster machine with hard disk, so that the whole index could be in one sequence.  A problem here was that "Masterfile" could only handle 16,000 entries, but fortunately an improved version of this program dubbed "PC Professional" became available with much greater capacity, so that the Joiner index now runs to 45,000 marriages on some 2.5 megabytes of hard disk.  This can be searched for both surnames in 30 seconds.

Mr Joiner points out the problem with indexing marriages, where there are two parties to each event; he has solved this by having only one entry for each, but the index can be searched on two fields (for groom and for bride).  Another part of the Durham marriage index by a different compiler, and not computerised, is indexed only by groom, and then listed by parish, so that several booklets have to be scanned in order to locate the marriage sought.

For the benefit of anyone who is interested in marriages in the counties covered, Mr Joiner has provided a list of the parishes included in his indexes - see pages 6-7 of this Newsletter.  If any of our readers is involved in work on marriage indexes, I am sure that Mr Joiner would be glad to share his experience with them  - and members of SIGG would like to share in any ensuing correspondence. 

His address is:  Paul R. Joiner, Greystones, The Spital, Yarm, Cleveland TS15 9EX.

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