There are a number of avenues to explore if you’re searching for the marriage of your nonconformist ancestor – and many of the records are now available online, says legal historian Rebecca Probert
RECORD MASTERCLASS
Nonconformist marriage records pose particular challenges for researchers. Here ‘nonconformist’ is used to refer to Christians who belonged to a Protestant denomination other than the Church of England. Before 1837, the law only made provision for marriages to be conducted by Anglican ministers. This affected nonconformist marriage practices and their records.
Most nonconformists simply married in the parish church. The exception to this was the Quakers, members of the Religious Society of Friends, who established their distinctive marriage practices in the 17th century. Their meticulous records usually provide more detail than contemporaneous Anglican records, and name all those who were present at the wedding. By 1750, almost 18,000 Quaker weddings had taken place. The 1753 Clandestine Marriages Act then exempted Quakers (and Jews) from the need to marry in the parish church. Quaker records up to 1841 are held by The National Archives at Kew (TNA) in series RG 6:
discovery.nationalarchives.gov. uk/details/r/C13331.
TNA also has the few pre-1837 marriage registers from other nonconformists, such as Baptists, Presbyterians and Congregationalists (or ‘Independents’). These can be found with other non-parochial registers in RG 4 and RG 8, and all three series are on Ancestry (ancestry.co.uk), BMD Registers (bmdregisters.co.uk), Findmypast (findmypast. co.uk) and TheGenealogist (thegenealogist.co.uk).
However, these registers generally just record that one of the congregation had married in church. If you have found such an entry, always check whether there is a corresponding record of the actual marriage in the Anglican parish registers.
By the early 19th century, nonconformists had become increasingly dissatisfied at having to marry in the Church of England, and lobbied for a change in the law. Under the 1836 Marriage Act, from July 1837 all nonconformists could marry in their place of worship if it was registered for weddings. They could also marry in one of the new register offices. Whichever alternative they chose, the wedding had to be attended by a registrar, recorded, and registered at the General Register Office (GRO), so it should be on the free website FreeBMD (freebmd.org.uk). Quakers were again treated differently, with meeting houses being issued with their own official
