Source Information

Ancestry.com. Virginia, U.S., Marriages of the Northern Neck of Virginia, U.S., 1649-1800 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2012.
Original data: Headley, Robert K. Married Well and Often: Marriages of the Northern Neck of Virginia, 1649–1800. Baltimore, MD, USA: Genealogical Publishing Co., 2003.

About Virginia, U.S., Marriages of the Northern Neck of Virginia, U.S., 1649-1800

This book contains references to marriages in Virginia’s Northern Neck extracted from a variety of records.

Robert Headley’s Married Well and Often lists some 7,000 marriages that took place in Lancaster, Northumberland, Old Rappahannock, Richmond, and Westmoreland counties or are referenced in their records.

Headley started with marriage license bonds for Northumberland County (1783–1800), Westmoreland County (1772–1800), Richmond County (1750–1800), and Lancaster County (1701–1800). He then turned to scattered licenses, fee books, ministers' returns, family Bibles, bonds, notes in various volumes of court records, and will books and deed books for Northumberland, Lancaster, Westmoreland, Old Rappahannock, and Richmond counties.

The result is a work with many unusual features. Besides the names of husband and wife and the date of marriage, entries may contain

  • parents
  • grandparents
  • former spouses
  • children of previous marriages
  • securities for the groom
  • guardians
  • clergymen

In addition, Headley spells out parent and child relationships, sibling relationships, and a wealth of incidental detail concerning illegitimate children, places of birth and residence, putative marriages, dates of death of one or more parents, exact spellings of names, and precise dates of marriage. The “How to Use This Book” page in the introductory material explains the author’s arrangement of entries and abbreviations.

If you have even a glimmer of interest in the Northern Neck of Virginia, this exhaustive work is bound to satisfy you.