The Six-Hour Marriage Records Marathon

I took a day off work today from my job as admissions counselor at UGA.  I'm probably the only person in Clarke County that wanted to spend my day in the Banks County Courthouse pouring through marriage records, but that's what I did for six hours straight.  My feet are killing me from standing on that hard, tiled floor for that long period of time.  I'm so glad I'm in there doing this research now when I'm 45, rather than 20 years down the road when I won't even be able to probably stand for over an hour at the time.

Let's just say the Probate Court records office is not that user friendly when it comes to having a place to sit and work.  The large marriage ledger books are not only heavy but also not easy to maneuver around.  The reading area is about chest high so a chair won't even reach high enough if you did want to sit down.

I was much more organized on this visit.  As I had been working on my Maysville Family Tree, I had placed couples into a marriage lookup file to look for their marriage records next time I was at the courthouse.  I had even recorded an approximate date range and the corresponding marriage ledger for that year range to speed things up.  I was able to find probably close to 40 matches out of the 250 or so I had put in the lookup file.

I also wrote down nearly 150 marriages that I thought would be good to add in a list on my VictorianMaysville.com website.  I know there are a lot of folks like me that love to find transcribed court records on the internet if possible.

I left the courthouse at 5 p.m. and called up Pete Mintz to see if I could stop by on my way from Homer to Maysville.  I had all the photographs of Maysville in my collection in a box in my trunk and wanted him to see them.  We sat for about 30 minutes looking through them.  Pete has told me a lot about the store buildings and things he remembers from being a boy growing up around Maysville at the Crossroads at Mintz Store.

The time always flies by when I'm researching, so it was back to Athens to my apartment to start entering some of these marriages into my database.  Look for them to be added to my site in the future.