Source:The St Catherine's Marriage Index

The following is copied from the http://genuki.cs.ncl.ac.uk/StCathsTranscriptions/index.html:

Introduction

The records of civil registration of post-1837 births, marriages and deaths in England and Wales that are held by the General Register Office (St Catherine's House) are not available to the public, though individual certificates can be purchased. What is available, including on microfiche or microfilm at many libraries, is a set of indexes to these records. The marriage indexes have separate entries for husbands and wives, and so it can be very difficult to identify the entries for a given marriage, and essentially impossible if only one spouse's name is known, from the indexes alone. Thus one is left with the considerable expense of having to commission the GRO to perform searches, or to purchase certificates that might well turn out to be irrelevant. Mike Foster, of New Zealand, has been exploring improved ways of exploiting the information that is provided by the marriage indexes, by producing reorganized transcriptions of the some of the indexes. The result is what are in effect almost reconstitutions of the original records, which bring together the names of each of the spouses of each of the up to four marriages that were recorded on a single page.

The resulting files, which with Mike Foster's permission are made available here, can be searched using your browser's "Find" command, in order to attempt to find a particular named individual, and a small group of possible marriage partners of this individual.

The files, like the original GRO record volumes, but unlike the indexes, each cover a separate area of England and Wales. Though already very extensive, especially for what is to date almost entirely the work of one transcriber, Mike Foster himself, they of course cover only a small fraction of the entire GRO indexes. However they have enabled much to be learned about the organization and accuracy of the GRO records and their indexes, as well as showing how tremendously valuable such a complete set of reorganized transcriptions would be to family historians and others.

Note: The files are also being made available (in zipped form) for download from the GENUKI-L archive.

A Complete Transcription for the March Quarter of 1849

These twenty-seven files have been produced from a complete transcription of the St Catherine's House Marriage Index covering the period Jan-March, 1849, and comprising some 58000 names.