The Director of this digitisation project

The process was the copy of the church certificate was provided to the  Registrar within one  month of the marriage. It is from that document a transcription was made by the clerk. It is a copy of that transcription that we have previously bought as the marriage certificate.

Before the Registrar digitised the pre-1890 marriages it was a typewritten copy (of a copy); after the digitisation we got a digital copy of the clerk’s copy.

Now after this latest digitisation by the Department, we will receive a digital copy of an actual certificate with the signatures of the bride, groom and witnesses rather than the transcription we have been able to buy previously.

The actual signatures

In some cases, the marriage source documents will be a number of pages, such as when the bride or groom was underage and needed parental consent, or in a case where someone was known by a different name to their birthname and filed out a statutory declaration to that effect. In one admittedly unusual case there were SEVEN source documents for the one marriage certificate (so if you have a Harold Lonsdale Robinson married in 1916 you will have hit the jackpot!)