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The Western States Marriage Records Index is an exact spelling search engine. It will not automatically search for variant spelling of your family names. If you cannot find your family using the five steps listed below, try changing the spelling of your surnames (variations) and repeat steps three and four.

  1. Search by full name of the bride
  2. If your results are negative, search by full name of the groom.
  3. If you are still not finding a marriage entry, try searching by the last name (only) of the bride.
  4. Search by the last name (only) of the groom.
  5. Review the list of counties and time period included to make sure the index covers your location and time. You can search an entire county by selecting only the state and county fields. If you do this from the advanced search page and specify a date range, the list comes back chronologically instead of alphabetically.
  6. Wildcard searching is supported. By default right hand truncation is provided for both first and last name. For example, entering a first name of "Ma" would yield names such as "Matthew", "Mark" and "Marvin." A last name search of "Mi" would yield "Miller", "Miles" and "Miner." You can also use a "%" sign to look for variant spellings in the middle of a name. Ex., "B%n" would find "Ben", "Benjamin", "Bernard" and "Barnaby." You can even define a range of characters between brackets.: Ex., "Ols[eo]n" would return both "Olsen", and "Olson." You can exclude a range of characters by provide a the "^" symbol inside brackets. Ex., "Ols[^e]n" would return "Olson" but not "Olsen."