Lackawanna County Marriage Licenses Index

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Beginning on Oct. 1, 1885, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania required each county to issue licenses for any couple desiring to marry. The couple did not have to take out the license in the county of their residence. Although the basic information required on the application was the same, each county kept their information in a different manner. In addition to creating a copy of the application, Lackawanna created a master index book for Marriage Licenses.

A complete marriage license docket (file) consists of 4 parts: application, consent form (if required), a form for the couple to keep (the return) and the duplicate return, which the person performing the ceremony was to return to the courthouse. The information from the application, the consent forms and the duplicate return, were then transferred to an affidavit in a bound volume. It is this affidavit which has been microfilmed. The result is that many clerks could work on any given license, and the variety of handwriting styles complicates this project; a difficulty which we hope has been overcome. For the first sixty some volumes of affidavits there is an index as well in front of each volume. These volumes of affidavits are sometimes referred to as marriage dockets even though they are only a transcribed copy of the documents in the original file. It is interesting to point out that only one person needed to appear to have a license issued, and they did not have to go to the courthouse. An application could be taken at the mayor's office, or in the office of a Justice of the Peace, or alderman.

To be legally married, the license had to be used within 60 days, the duplicate returned within 30 days after the ceremony, and the ceremony performed within the county that issued the license (this requirement was quickly waived and the others generally snubbed). There are quite a few licenses that came back after the marriage was ended by the death of one of the partners forty or fifty some years after being issued. Some marriages never had their duplicates returned. The county had so much difficulty in getting the duplicates returned that they even threatened legal action against some priests and clergymen, but eventually everyone came around, and the process began to work as intended.

Every time a license was issued, an entry was to be made in the index book, and thus a log was created for when the duplicate returns came back to the courthouse. Not all applicants names made it into the index. The typical entry through 1904 would be "215 (year left blank) 1  223  Gress, Charles 14 Jan 1886" means that the license no 215 was issued to Charles Gress, recorded in (Marriage License, or docket) Vol. 1, page 223, and the return filed on Jan. 14, 1886. The marriage date may have been Jan. 8, and the application made on Jan. 7, but you don't know that from the index.  Some counties only give the license number but include the name of the spouse in the index, Lackawanna did not. Starting in 1905, the county started the practice of beginning anew each year, so the year of license becomes important in finding the correct one.

There are both index volumes and volumes for the marriage licenses (dockets) themselves. Index volume 1 contains names from 120 volumes of marriage licenses. It comprises the scope of this project, about 109,000 individuals. The goal was to add value to the microfilmed index by including the name of the spouse and parents. The first 21 volumes were transcribed from the affidavits contained in the docket volumes. The remainder have come from the index microfilms which contain 1,978 pages of information. In the initial submission of those volumes (22 to 120) made from the index films, the parents names have generally NOT been included because of time constraints. The few that are listed have come from prior research. It takes about an hour to fully transcribe to paper about 30 affidavits and we were looking at an additional 1500 hours to complete just the transcriptions, no typing and no verification. A volume contained 300 pages of license information through vol. 36, after which they usually contain 500 pages; the exceptions being vol. 106 through 111 which are 600 page books and an oddball volume marked as vol. 114½ with only a few dozen. By the time all 120 volumes are on-line (without the parental names), it is estimated that this project will have taken 3,000 man-hours to collect, assemble and audit.

The first index set of six books, 3 each for the men and women, marked as Index Vol. 1, was used from Oct. 1, 1885 to Dec. 31, 1914, and provided the index for the first 120 volumes of dockets. The second set of 8 books, Index Vol. 2, goes from Jan. 1, 1915 to Dec. 31, 1936 and covers vol. 121 to 249 of licenses; Index Vol. 3 continues to Dec. 31, 1957 including vol. 250 to 368, and Index Vol. 4 covers to 1995 when the county began keeping the information on their computers. Index Vol.2 and Index Volume 3 are available through the collection of the LDS church at their Family History Centers. Copies of the applications indexed here may also be obtained from the Register of Wills office at the Lackawanna County Courthouse, the PA State Archive in Harrisburg (in person only) and local genealogical societies. The courthouse now has a computer index similar to the ones in the master index books which contain only the name of one of the marriage partners and the marriage date, rather than the return date.

• Other Marriage Licenses Affidavit Lists: 1886-1936
• Marriage documentation provided by David Decker - scans
  George Decker and Clara Bennett 1902 Marriage
  George Jackson and Eva Stiles 1909 Marriage
  Jennie Toomey and Martin Corey 1909 Marriage
  Lawrence Toomey Bridget Gerrity 1907 Marriage
  David Decker Maud Jackson 1895 Marriage
• Marriage documents (scans) provided by Josh Felter:
• Tinklepaugh McConnell Marriage 1887
• Webb Springer Marriage 1889
• VanLuvender Kilmer Marriage 1910
• Felter Hoag Marriage 1924
• 1897 Marriage Henneforth Certificate, Scranton, Pa
• Extracts from Scranton Times, September 1920:
• Marriage Licenses,
• Engagements & Marriages

Permission is given to use this material on the PAGenWeb / USGenWeb project for the purpose of doing individual family research only. You may not copy them to another website (links are fine). Distribution in print or via any digital media is prohibited.

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