Fully indexed England and Wales marriages at Ancestry

Now we can easily look for those elusive 20th century marriages. Ancestry.co.uk have added a full nominal search capability to the England and Wales civil registration marriage indexes for 1916-2005. This is the second serving of a fully searchable collection of all the indexes promised for this year. Birth registration indexes were added earlier.

The search doesn't quite work as advertised yet. Although you can enter both bride and groom names only the principal name will be searched on. Also the "find spouse" search doesn't work. Hopefully they'll fix these issues. In the meantime you can look at the page image, find the spouse name and then search that to find the spouse first name.

Many people should be using this database in the next few days looking to extend some of their collateral lines forward, those a bit off to the side from their main line.