Marriage Index Notes

The original marriage index was prepared to show only the names of the brides and grooms and date of marriage. Now, most of the parishes have parent names included as well. If that wasn't enough, the index may include the place the person was from-- a valuable resource for those trying to make the connection between the US and Poland. If images are available online, the LDS image number may also be given to speed up your lookup. The biggest parishes in the database are St. John Cantius, Holy Trinity, and St. Stanislaus Kostka in Chicago. While the older version of the index was very good, this one is even better (fewer errors).

Why fewer errors? Most of the data was read for a second time after many years. The verification is better because reading biases of the past are different than this time around. Put another way, greater experience helps make for a more accurate index. With respect to St. Stanislaus Kostka Church in Chicago, the original data collection methodology was slightly flawed the first time around. St. Stanislaus was at one time the largest Polish parish outside of Poland. With limited time and resources, I used a shortcut to speed things along. Each St. Stanislaus marriage register has a full name index entry for each bride and groom. Furthermore, most registers are set up for only one marriage per page. This meant that I could copy names and page numbers from the register index very quickly for two reasons. The first reason is that the index either had better penmanship or was typed. The second reason is that there was less cranking (I'm talking about a microfilm reader, remember) from image to image.

After all the names were collected, I wrote a computer program to pair up the bride and groom names that were on each page of the register. Manually, the paired brides and grooms were separated into one column for grooms and one for brides. In general, this system worked very well-- and was fast. It's also the reason why much of my old St. Stanislaus Kostka index did not show the actual marriage date. Reading and creating an index can result in inevitable errors. Having created an index of an index meant errors in the original index were also in what I created. Going back and reading the original record enabled me to fix those errors and add dates, parents, etc.