« Reply #5 on: Wednesday 27 September 06 01:24 BST (UK) »
Hi Celia
Banns were introduced by the Hardwicke Marriage Act of 1753. Before this time there were no printed registers and the minister would simply write in the names of the parties and the date of the marriage, adding a note of the other parish if one of the parties was not local.
The first printed marriage registers don't have a lot of information on them and you could confuse them with the banns registers, but they are separate.
The banns register will give the names of the two parties to be married plus, in most cases, the parish to which each party belonged. They will also give the dates of the three Sundays on which the banns were read and the signature (hopefully) of the person reading them. This will be duplicated in both parishes if the two parties were not from the same parish. The register will sometimes contain a note of where the marriage was to take place (if at another church) or a margin note giving the actual date of the marriage.
The marriage certificate will then give the names and parishes of the two parties, whether by banns or license, the date of the marriage and the signatures or marks of the two parties and their witnesses. Where the marriage was by banns, there will be an associated entry in the banns register.
After civil registration commenced in 1837 the registers changed to their modern format, with far more complete information.
Regards, Bill
PS - I suppose you have checked that your local FHS hasn't already transcribed and/or indexed these registers?
Banks, Beer, Bowes, Castle, Cloak, Coachworth, Dixon, Farr, Golder, Graves, Hicks, Hogbin, Holmans, Marsh, Mummery, Nutting, Pierce, Rouse, Sawyer, Sharp, Snell, Willis: mostly in East Kent.
Ey, Sawyer: London
Evans: Ystradgynlais, Wales
Snell: Snettisham, Norfolk
Knight, Burgess, Ellis: Hampshire
Purdy: Ireland/Canada/Durham/Pennsylvania
McCann: Ireland
Morrow: Pennsylvania
Sparnon: any
Beers, Heath, Conyers, Miller, Russell, Larson, Clark, Sibert, Hopper, Reinhart: USA