New York City Dept. of Health and Mental Hygiene
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Welcome to the first searchable database of the 3, marriage licenses filed in New York City between It's free, public, open data. The data is in the public domain, no strings attached. Did you find this information useful? If so, please consider making a donation to Reclaim The Recordsthe non-profit organization who liberated this data through a Freedom of New york city death records after 1949 lawsuit, and who created this website.
Learn more about our work. Please enter a name You need to enter at least one given name or surname in order to new york city death records after 1949 search results. Please enter a start year and an end year If you fill in a start year, you need to fill in an end year too, and vice versa. This database only covers Make sure your start year is no earlier than and your end year is no later than Currently displaying just the top results.
More results and pagination coming soon. This is a three-page occasionally four-page document set originally issued by the New York New york city death records after 1949 Clerk's Office. Read all about it! Newer files are still stored there, but some older files have been moved to the New York City Municipal Archives. There is no separate index. Note that a marriage certificate is not the same thing as a new york city death records after 1949 license! The NYC Department of Personnel began a partnership registry for city employees in Augustand the City Clerk's Office began a formal registry for the general public in January The program was new york city death records after 1949 discontinued even after the statewide new york city death records after 1949 of same-sex marriage in June The index files created by the New York City Clerk's Office clearly had some problems with the quality of their data:.
Yes, in most states, a basic marriage license "log" or marriage license index is considered to be public information, even if the actual certificates or licenses may have strict privacy rules under the state's vital records laws. That ruling does require that any data deemed to be too personally intrusive, such as the street addresses of the license applicants, must be removed before making the data public.
The City Clerk's Office refused to comply with their request and a lawsuit was initiated in March The City Clerk's Office settled the case in Septemberproviding the data, and reimbursing Reclaim the Records' attorneys fees. You can read the whole story, along new york city death records after 1949 copies of the actual court filings, here. Their version of the database also includes two columns for the spouses' dates of birth, which were removed for privacy reasons before handing the data over as part of the legal settlement.
This is an invasion of privacy. No database exists yet for pre licenses, but the original handwritten ledgers were microfilmed. The index microfilms were recently digitized and new york city death records after 1949 online for free new york city death records after 1949 use; they were won in a Freedom of Information lawsuit.
And the index microfilms were won in a separate Freedom of Information lawsuit, and were uploaded to the Internet Archive in early There is also a totally separate record database that indexes the NYC Health Department marriage certificates up throughwhich was created by the combined volunteer efforts of two non-profit genealogical groups. Note that marriage certificates and marriage licenses are not the same thing. Read more about the many different kinds of New York City marriage records.
This data is in the public domain. But please let us know how you're using it, so we can link to your website or project, and show off all the cool stuff people have done with this open data. I can't find certain people in this database, but I know they were married in New York City between and ! This database only holds records of licenses filed in New York City.
If the people you're looking for were living somewhere else nearby, such as Westchester county or Nassau county, they may have applied for the license therebut signed the papers at the wedding ceremony held new york city death records after 1949 New York City.
Additionally, the contents of this data, as provided by the City Clerk's office, have some This may make it difficult to find people who "should" be in there. Read more about the known problems with the data. I found certain people in this database, but I know they were not married in New York City between and ! A tiny number of people in this database may have applied for and received a license from the City -- sometimes even more than once!
Again, this is a database of licenses. Whether the couple actually said "I Do" is not recorded here. The year listed for certain people's license is wrong; the database lists the year before they were married? Licenses were valid for several weeks. It is possible that some people could have applied for a license in December of one year, but married in January of the next year.
The license year would match the application, not the ceremony. New York is very unusual in that the City and the State are two totally separate vital records new york city death records after 1949. That data will also be released to the public, since it too should be in the public domain. Make sure you sign up for our free e-mail mailing list to follow our progress on that, and our other records requests. I still can't find a person in this database, and I really think that they should be in there.
When in doubt, you should talk to the City Clerk's Office directly. Their copy of this database also includes information about the bride's and groom's dates of birth, while this one does not, and perhaps they can do a look-up on those fields for you to help you track down a stubbornly missing record.
Also note that the original handwritten ledger indices for the licenses, which were previously only available on microfilm, have now been digitally scanned and were put online in early In the event that you can't find someone in this text database, you may wish to look through those original index images instead.
Those index images are not text-searchable, but they're sorted by borough and by year, and then are arranged by quarter of the year, and then are listed alphabetically new york city death records after 1949 surname, so they're not too difficult to use. If so, please consider making a donation to Reclaim The Recordsthe non-profit organization who liberated this data through a Freedom of Information lawsuit, and who run this website.
Learn more about what we do. Too many government agencies and archives have long treated genealogists as if we were asking them for a favor when we ask to see their records — our records — rather than recognizing their responsibilities to the public under the law.
Reclaim The Records is changing that. Our EIN is Start Your Free Search Online. Read more about the data and its flaws before trying to use it. Make a Donation to Reclaim The Records. Bride or Spouse 1 Given Name. Groom or Spouse 2 Given Name. License Number Coming soon. Tips and Tricks All fields are optionalonly fill out as much as you know. Soundalike surnames and spelling variants are automatically searched. For example, a search for the surname Chang will also bring up results new york city death records after 1949 Zhang and Chana search for Schwartz also finds Swartz new york city death records after 1949, a search for Russo also finds Rousseauetc.
Common nicknames are automatically searched, too. For example, a search for the given name Bill will also bring up results for WilliamWillBillyetc. Note that the soundalike name suggestions will not be as precise if you are using wildcards in your search. Marriage Licenses, This is a three-page occasionally four-page document set originally issued by the New York City Clerk's Office. Marriage Certificates, late 19 th century - This is a two-page document set originally issued by the New York City Health Department.
Domestic Partnerships, The NYC Department of Personnel began a partnership registry for city employees in Augustand the City Clerk's Office began a formal registry for the general public in January Same-sex marriages registered in New York City after June will be included with the marriage licenses, not with this data set. XLS Microsoft Excel spreadsheet files, one file per borough except for Manhattan which was broken up into two files.
Each spreadsheet file had multiple sheets of data within it, and each sheet had a maximum of 65, entries on it. The spreadsheets' cells and columns were in text format even in cases where it was inappropriate, such as the column for license sequence license ID numbers which were a series of integers.
The spreadsheets lacked a primary or unique key or auto-incrementing field. The license sequence number alone could not be used, as it was only unique within each year and possibly within each borough, and we could not be sure there were any internal database constraints to ensure it was actually a unique field.
In other words, the cells had not been "trimmed". While the spaces were not always visible, this could represent a problem if someone were importing the files directly into a SQL database or trying to a search on a name. According to one row in the Brooklyn spreadsheet, Brooklyn marriage license numbers through for the year are apparently "void". So far, we have discovered that there are at least 28, to 30, missing records for Manhattan for ! Those records do exist at the City New york city death records after 1949 Office but for some reason they are not listed in this database.
We'll probably discover other small batches of missing records as we continue to have people use this database. We turned the six original. XLS spreadsheets into five very large and basically-cleaned-up. CSV files, one for each borough, all ready for people to use in applications, data analysis, or their own research. We concatenated all the separate sheets back into single columns, trimmed the excess spaces from cells, formatted the license field as numbers instead of text, turned all instances where the middle name columns literally said "NULL" into actual NULL 's, and did other basic cosmetic fixes, but we did not attempt to change any of the actual name data, not even in cases where the names were clearly recorded with typos or other content problems.
Content problems The index files new york city death records after 1949 by the New York City Clerk's Office clearly had some problems with the quality of their data: There are several obvious misspellings of common given names, like "Rchard" for "Richard"etc. There are also many names with obviously transposed letters.
There is no consistency about how surnames with suffixes like "Jr" are handled. The suffixes were unfortunately included in the surname column directly, not in their own column. Sometimes there will be a space before the suffix, sometimes a comma and a space, sometimes just a comma.
