Find your ancestors in Wiltshire parish marriages index 1538-1933

Discover your English ancestry by unveiling your ancestor’s marriage record. A marriage record will reveal your ancestor’s residence, marital status, and, in later records, father’s name, a critical fact for adding another generation to your family tree.

This collection contains marriage records gathered from two sources. One set of records, which only provide transcripts, was created from the original parish registers and bishop’s transcripts held by the Wiltshire Record Office. The other set of records provides both an image and a transcript for each marriage entry. These come from Phillimore’s marriage registers.

Every record will provide a transcript. The detail found in each transcript will vary depending on the age of the record and the source. You will may find a combination of the following facts:

• Name
• Age
• Birth year
• Residence
• Marital status – the status is abbreviated as B (bachelor), S (spinster), or W (widow)
• Marriage date
• Place
• County
• Country
• By license or bann
• Spouse’s name
• Spouse’s age
• Spouse’s residence
• Spouse’s occupation
• Spouse’s marital status
• Father’s name
• Spouse’s father’s name
• First witness
• Second witness

Images

The images from Phillimore’s marriage registers will reveal similar details to the transcripts, along with the groom’s occupation.

Discover more about these records

Early marriage registers recorded limited details about the marriage including the couple’s name, the date of marriage, residence, and marital status. Later records, particularly after 1837, recorded the couple’s ages along with the names of the couple’s fathers and witnesses to the marriage. Most of the transcripts in this collection were created from Anglican parish registers and bishop’s transcripts; however, they will include the names of couples from other denominations including non-conformists. From 1754, non-conformists were legally required to be married in an Anglican church. This restriction was repealed in 1837.

The Phillimore marriage registers were created by William Phillimore Watts Phillimore. William, the son of a doctor, was born in Nottingham and was educated as a lawyer. In 1897, he started his own publishing company, Phillimore & Co. Ltd, which published works related to British family history. Later in life, William transcribed and printed parish marriage registers for over a thousand parishes. He continued to work in family history until his death in 1914.