You may have noticed that in October, Ancestry released a new database from Newspapers.com “U.S., Newspapers.com Marriage Index, 1800s-1999.” I have found the database to be a fantastic resource. From the Corporate blog:

“The Newspapers.com Marriage Index collection adds to the world’s largest, searchable digital archive of newspaper published historical wedding announcements. Since the early 1800s, newspapers across the country have been publishing rich information about engagements, marriage license applications, wedding announcements, and more.”¹

I have been using the database for a couple of months now and I have to say I am quite impressed with some of the articles that I’ve found that I missed during other search sessions. I can’t say why I missed them, except that this database is narrowed down to marriage announcements only thereby narrowing down results you might otherwise get by doing a general search at Newspapers.com. I have found that it weeds out some of the “noise” for me in search results, allowing me to more easily spot articles that pertain to my research.

Of course, not every database is going to be flawless. And while machine learning algorithms can help, nothing beats human eyes and interpretation of the articles as we see them. So don’t rely solely on this database, especially if you know something should be there. However, it can help eliminate some of the chaff (we have millions of pages of digitized newspapers these days!) and perhaps bring forward some items you didn’t know existed.

If you have an Ancestry account, go to the card catalog and type in “U.S., Newspapers.com Marriage Index, 1800s-1999” in the title field, or the link directly to the database is here.²

I hope you find this new index as valuable as I have.

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^{1. See “Ancestry® Debuts World’s Largest, Searchable Digital Archive of Newspaper Published Historical Wedding Announcements,” Ancestry Corporate (https://www.ancestry.com/corporate/blog/ancestry-debuts-worlds-largest-searchable-digital-archive-newspaper-published-historical : viewed 9 February 2021), published 19 October 2020.↩}

^{2. Please note that Newspapers.com is a separate subscription from Ancestry unless you have one of their combined subscriptions. Also, if a newspaper article is in a newer issue of the newspaper, it might fall under their “Publishers Extra” subscription which is a separate fee. Among other things, this extra fee covers the extra licensing fees required to publish newspaper images that are still under copyright.↩}