Fleet Marriages

One of the recent podcasts in the series from TNA was on The Fleet Registers or irregular marriage registers of 17th and 18th century London. Presented by Audrey Collins it is one of the best I've listened to recently, suffering only from not having the visuals that were used at Kew.

Toward the end of the presentation she makes reference to the forthcoming release of a database.

It's now available.

The September newsletter from S&N Genealogy announces the availability of the database for these legal but clandestine or irregular marriages performed without benefit of the usual constraints of the Established Church.

The registers, held by TNA, have been digitized and indexed. Fleet marriages which occurred between 1667 and 1777 are estimated to account for up-to a third of the marriages that happened in the country during their peak.

According to the announcement there are about 800,000 people named in the marriage records and about 2400 people mentioned in baptismal records. This makes it a substantial set of records that cover the period . A proportion of these will be duplicates due to the nature of the way these are recorded in different documents.

The records can be freely searched online by visiting the official National Archives Non-Conformist site at www.BMDregisters.co.uk

Payment is required to look at the full details or image of the original documents.

The records are also included as part of TheGenealogist.co.uk Premium Subscription which allows credit free access to the records.