County Sligo Heritage and Genealogy Society is delighted to announce the release of a collection of 14,000 Civil marriage records for County Sligo. The records can be searched and viewed online through the www.rootsIreland.ie website. These records cover the time period from 1864 to 1920 and are the most recent collection of records Sligo has made available to researchers online.

The Civil Registrar Districts covered by these records are listed below:

District	Marriages
Aclare	1866-1920
Ballymote	1864-1920
Castleconnor	1864-1920
Easkey	1864-1920
Gurteen	1864-1920
Skreen	1864-1920
Sligo No. 1	1864-1920
Sligo No. 2	1864-1920
Tubbercurry	1864-1920

This set of records will be particularly valuable to researchers, who for one reason or another were unable to uncover a church marriage record for their ancestors. This may have occurred due to the records being lost, damaged, or as often happened, the marriage had taken place in a parish where church record keeping had not yet commenced

They will also be very useful to people whose ancestors married in the period 1900 to 1920, a period, which up until now, was not covered by our Sligo online records collection.

Even if your research has already uncovered a church marriage record, these records may still be of some interest to you because, if your ancestors married after 1864, they may have two records of marriage, namely a civil record and a church record. As each record may contain different details it is worth checking both.

A civil marriage record is particularly informative as it typically includes the date and place of marriage, the names of the parties, their ages (often just ‘Full’ or ‘Minor’), current marital status, occupations, addresses, fathers’ names and fathers’ occupations. It also usually includes the witnesses to the marriage.

The Civil Records of  Marriage are the official State records of marriages in Ireland.  Non-Catholic marriages were registered from April 1845, while universal registration of all births, marriages and deaths began in 1864.