Tuesday's Tip - Legacy's advanced tagging feature.

Continuing on with our marriage theme this month, I have found that the search feature and advanced tagging are my friends as I am working through marriages in my Legacy database. I would not suggest anyone work with Ancestry.com today (it has suffered a service glitch and is having "issues" - saw an apology for the service glitch during one of the few times it was up and running for me today). So what's a gal to do?

Well I know that I have several marriages in two States that have great online records - Minnesota and Washington. I decided to run a search focusing on marriages in each of those States and used the advanced tagging feature to check if I need a source (or a better source) for those marriages. I printed off PDFs for each State and am slowly but surely working my way through the list. Lucky for me, the Washington Digital Archives has great search capabilities and provides lots of detail.

Oftentimes, you can download a jpeg or pdf of the marriage record. Lots of detail to mine here - the date and place of the marriage, the parties, often the ages of the parties, sometimes where they were born and where they currently reside, the names of the witnesses, the name of the officiant and the recording County and number. I have over 300 Washington marriages and so far I have 175 of the records from this online resource. Do you have online marriage records for any of your States?

A couple of reminders or tips when doing a search for marriage records:

(1) stay broad - you might be off by a year or a surname may have changed or been indexed incorrectly. I notice many marriage dates are off (I'm guessing premature babies!) AND sometimes the couple is not married in their residence county (hmm?), or the surname has been indexed and often what is clear to me certainly wasn't to the indexer (some interesting penmanship).

(2) work through a group of names at a time - whether I am working with Andersons, Keoughs, or Murphys - you will often find your people in the same county over time. Try working with a surname (usually the indexing puts the given names in alphabetical order and you can find a cluster of a surname at a time).

(3) when all else fails - try just the first names and a county with a timeframe. I was able to back into a few marriage certificates this way as the surname was just enough off that I would not have found it.

(4) this should really be the first tip but - read up on what is included and excluded. Are the records limited to certain years and/or counties? If so, you can modify your search to fit those parameters. Don't waste your time searching for a record that does not exist in that resource.

So, how are you coming with your marriages in your Legacy database? Why not share your tips or suggestions with the rest of us.