Public Marriage Records - Indispensable to Today's Times

If you want to check up on any past legalized romances of your future spouse, look up if he or she has any previous marriage records you don’t know about.

Public marriage records are required for many transactions in America today, most notably financial ones, such as applying for loans and changing tax status. However, marriage records are also used in proving felonies.

Consider the story of the very good-looking male model who married a woman — and three others. He did not earn any substantial amount of money, and yet he did it. Although it sounds like the stuff of fiction, this handsome polygamist was featured in a recent documentary called “Intimate Deception”, part of the Investigative Reports series on the A&E Network.

The same documentary also featured a man who wed three women within a year, while already married to a fourth.

Public Marriage Records Keep Order

Public marriage records are one way that government aims to keep society in order. Before state guidelines even existed, individual counties sought to keep order by providing marrying couples with forms to fill out and return after marriage.

The county would then either compile marriage forms dated over a certain period as one book, or simply file them among the general court records. Some marriage records even made their way into town minute books!

Early marriage records also took the form of:

• Marital Intentions (written and signed)

• Declarations of Intent

• Affidavits of Consent (especially when underage)

• Bonds (posted by the man!)

Today, marriage records contain details of the couples’ lives, such as where they earn a living and their health status. The records also contain a marriage contract that entails certain marital obligations of fidelity, emotional, and financial support.

Marriage documents are basically tools that allow state governments to keep track of the status and activities of their citizens, especially since many violations of the marriage contract lead to other crimes.

States have noted that the crime of polygamy, for instance, is usually compounded by welfare fraud, domestic violence, incest, statutory rape, child abuse, and murder.

The cases mentioned above left the women emotionally shattered. Others also ended up in financial ruin.

The fact that violators of the marriage contract are not only clever con artists but criminal predators as well makes the accessibility of public marriage records welcome indeed to anyone skeptical about the antecedents of their mate.

So do you want to check if your future partner has been married before? If so, begin your search at RecordsSiteReviews' public marriage records section.