Discover marriage notices collected from our extensive holdings of Irish newspapers. Learn how your ancestors announced their marriages in the pages of the press and break down your Irish family history brick walls.
Discover marriage notices collected from our extensive holdings of Irish newspapers. Learn how your ancestors announced their marriages in the pages of the press and break down your Irish family history brick walls.
Each record consists of a transcript and original image of the newspaper page where the marriage notice was published. Marriage notices were submitted to newspapers after the marriage had taken place. They contained the details of the newlyweds, oftentimes alongside the names of their parents, and the location where the wedding service was held. By investigating the original newspaper image, you may even learn the name of the officiant who conducted the service and the occupations of those in the wedding party.
The amount of information included will vary from marriage notice to marriage notice, but you will be able to uncover a combination of the following:
You can also find the following information about the publication in which the birth notice appeared:
These marriage notices have been sourced from our rich collection of Irish newspapers and span the 19th and 20th centuries. The marriage notices come from newspapers across Ireland. Following the establishment of the Republic of Ireland in 1921, these records cover both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
Notices of marriages, births and deaths, as well as in memoriam notices, are an incredibly useful tool for researching your Irish family history. Following the destruction of the Four Courts on 30 June 1922, many public records were lost, and so newspaper notices can help replace these missing records. Such newspaper notices even predate official record keeping in Ireland, which did not begin until 1864.
From the 1820s onwards notices of marriages, births and deaths began to appear more regularly in Irish newspapers. Readers were encouraged to submit notices of family events for a fee, the length and detail of the notices often being impacted by such a cost. This economic factor also means that not all of the population would have been able to afford the insertion of their important life events into the press.
However, you will find that many newspapers often devoted multiple columns to their notices of births, marriages and deaths. They appeared as a recurring feature in daily and weekly publications, and their popularity endures even today.
Some marriage notices will contain just the initials and surnames of those who had tied the knot, especially in the case of the groom. This is less common in the case of the bride, so it may be worth beginning your search with the bride’s full name.
Marriage notices are filled with all sorts of abbreviations, from those to do with dates, such as ‘on the 5th inst.’ (short for ‘the 5th of this month’) and occupations, such as ‘Rev’ (short for ‘Reverend’). Others denote rank, like ‘Esq. ‘(short for ‘Esquire’), which historically denoted a landed proprietor or country squire.
Marriage notices may come from further afield than Ireland. Families would often publish notices about family members who had emigrated to the likes of Australia and America. If you have ancestors with Irish roots, who perhaps emigrated from Ireland, you may find notices of their marriages in this collection.
Furthermore, it is important to remember that the place of publication of the newspaper may be different from where the event happened. For example, the news of the marriage of Catherine Kinsella to John Doran in Liverpool in 1879 was reported in newspapers published in Wexford and Belfast, with the instruction for the American papers to ‘please copy.’ You can search by the location where an event happened via our place search field, or you can filter your search by newspaper title.