Cape Breton Genealogy and Historical Association expands website.

Important marriage records added to CBGHA website

There have been some important changes made to the Cape Breton Genealogy and Historical Association website, http://www.cbgen.org/.

Members may have noticed that the 12 research items that we previously sold in the website store are no longer for sale.

The CBGHA is pleased to announce that the marriage records for Inverness, Richmond, Victoria and Cape Breton counties are now included with all the other records on the site. This project took several years to complete and could not have been completed without our wonderful volunteers. The records cover a period from 1850s to 1912 approximately; the time period varies slightly from county to county.

These marriage records are digital copies of the original records and may be copied from the CBGHA site to your computer. The records are the marriage license applications or permissions used to make up the marriage registers of the different counties. Most records contain information on the bride and groom; where they lived, where they were born, how they were employed; there may also be information on the parents of the bride and groom.

Marriage records can be a great source of information. The records contain several types of documents such as slips, bonds, licenses, banns or affidavits. There are over 25,000 marriage records in this collection.

This material can be searched by husband’s surname or wife’s maiden name or date with the Windows search function (CTRL +F) or you may choose to simply scroll through the records. We also recommend scrolling slowing through the records, you may find many interesting facts you were not expecting. We do not suggest that these records cover all marriages for the time period covered but these records are the ones that were registered provincially.

We are confident that people using these records will find them informative and helpful in their genealogy research of Cape Breton Island. The marriage records can now be found in our records section under civil and listed as the file names below –

• Cape Breton County marriages - 1850-1912 (photos);

• Inverness County marriages - 1862-1908 (photos);

• Richmond County marriages – 1849 – 1918 (photos) and

• Victoria County marriage licences – 1864 – 1918 (photos).

You are invited to visit our help centre located in the former Bank of Montreal building, open Tuesday and Thursday each week, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Use of the help centre is free and open to everyone.

New members are always welcome.