Source Information

Ancestry.com. Missouri, U.S., Compiled Marriages, 1754-1850 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 1997.
Original data: Dodd, Jordan. Missouri Marriages to 1850. Electronic transcription of marriage records held by the individual counties in Missouri.

About Missouri, U.S., Compiled Marriages, 1754-1850

This database of Missouri marriages to 1850 contains over 125,000 names. Each entry includes groom, bride, marriage date, county, and state. Every name is indexed so you can search for one name, or two names that are linked.

Early American Marriage Collection

This collection of early American marriages represents years of research gathering marriages from local town and county sources. While these marriages have been published in book form for their individual states, now you can search several nearby states at once with just a few keystrokes. Although not every marriage was recorded, or later found as this collection was assembled, you will surely find many of your early relatives, often in places you never planned on searching.

Ancestry is pleased to present this collection of early American marriages, now available in electronic form to make searches easier than ever before. This collection is based on years of research by Jordan R. Dodd and his staff at Liahona Research and was first published as a series of books by Precision Indexing Publishers, a division of American Genealogical Lending Library of Bountiful, Utah. Liahona Research conducted their searches in the world-famous collections of the Family History Library in Salt Lake City and all the marriages in this collection can be found in the myriad of records at that library. The staff at Liahona poured through published books and microfilmed copies of original records to collect these marriages.

Cautions About this Collection

Every effort was made to keep the spelling in the original text, and to find all possible records for the time period covered. However, many county records were destroyed by fire, floods, neglect, and carelessness.

The purpose of this collection is to provide a time and place for as many marriages as possible. It is up to the researcher to examine the original records (usually available on microfilm) and gather whatever additional genealogical information is desired.

In this collection, the marriage date is usually the date of marriage as given in the original entry. However, when no marriage date is given (e.g., the marriage return was not provided to the record keeper), the date of the license is used. In a few cases, a marriage will be listed twice, but in two different counties. This most often happened when a couple obtained a license in one county, but were actually married in another county. To provide additional research clues, this collection includes both entries.

There are records that may have been overlooked, misspelled, or not available to the researchers. Therefore, if a marriage is suspected to have occurred, but is not in this collection, further research in additional sources may locate the evidence.

Finding the Original Marriage Record

Unfortunately, Liahona Research did not indicate which sources were used in this process, nor did they provide citations for the origin of each entry. However, careful researchers who wish to examine the original source will find sufficient information to lead them to that source. Most early American marriages were recorded by the county (except in the northeastern states) and this collection provides the county for virtually every marriage. Original microfilms can be obtained from the Family History Library.