Marriage Bonds: How to Use Them to Build Family Relationships

Most genealogists are quite familiar with marriage licenses. Depending on where you live, they may or may not contain quite a bit of information. However, if your ancestors resided in the south or some mid-Atlantic states throughout the nineteenth century, you have another record set to examine that may help you to link families when marriage licenses are limited. These are marriage bonds, and we’ll take a look this week at what they are and why they may be useful to you in your research.

Evolving from the custom of marriage banns, (announcing an intention to marry in church on successive Sundays), marriage bonds were a means of ensuring that a groom would carry through his promise to wed. A marriage bond was a legally binding document obliging a groom to fulfill his responsibility. He or his bondsman, sometimes called a surety, paid a specific amount of money to the court as a promise of the groom's good intentions. The bond fee was usually quite high. Its purpose was to discourage fraud, bigamy, criminal intent (like stealing a woman’s money), or any similar reason for not going through with the marriage. If it turned out there was such an impediment to the marriage, the amount paid in the bond would be forfeited to the local government. 

Usually, the bond was filed in the court where the marriage was to take place. They were not the same as marriage licenses, although many times you will find bonds and licenses together. In a marriage bond, you will find the name of the groom and sometimes, but not always, the name of the bride. If either or both were underage, you will find an attached paper giving the consent of a parent or guardian, and you will see the names of one or more bondsmen or surety, the person (or people) putting up the money guaranteeing a wedding will take place. Sometimes, the groom himself paid the bond, but in other cases, the bondsman is frequently a relative or close family friend.

Be careful not to confuse the bond date with the marriage date. In old court records, often the bond is a separate piece of paper with a unique date. Sometimes all that is left of the marriage records in a particular county are the bonds, but you should note in your genealogy program that this is usually NOT a marriage date. You do need to remember that just because there is a bond does not mean there was a marriage. Someone could have died, moved, or forfeited their money before completing the process.

To the left is a marriage bond from Hardin County, Kentucky, dated 17 April 1818. Charles Vertrees and Presley N. Haycraft pledged fifty pounds, in the current currency, to ensure that Charles would marry Milley Vernon. The witness, at the lower left and marked by the abbreviation “Test,” was William Fairleigh. All three men signed the bond.

(Marriage Book A, p. 72, Hardin County, Kentucky)

Attached to this bond at the bottom of the sheet of paper is a consent note from Milley’s father, who, in his creative spelling, authorized Samuel Haycraft to “give Charles Vertrees a lison [sic] in order to mary [sic] his daughter Miley [sic]. The note is dated 12 April 1818. 

From this single sheet of paper, we can prove who Milley’s father was and that she was too young to marry without his permission. We learn from further research that Samuel Haycraft was Charles’s uncle, married to his mother’s sister; Presley Neville Haycraft was Samuel's son, Charles's cousin and contemporary; and William Fairleigh was a cousin and contemporary, also related on his mother’s side of the family. (Researching in the Hardin County Courthouse, we also found a single sheet titled "Retirn of marriage lisons" which notes that Charles and Milley maried [sic] on the 19th of April. Had we relied solely on the internet, we might have missed that sheet because it does not appear to have been placed online. Sadly, Milly, who was eighteen when she married, only lived four more years, although she did leave a daughter who grew to old age. Charles married again and had nine more children.)

You may find lists of marriage bonds in published county-level books. Many have been microfilmed and/or digitized and are accessible from large websites like FamilySearch and Ancestry and on local levels as well. The images shown here come from the website of the County Clerk of Hardin County, Kentucky—https://hccoky.org. Check the counties in which your family lived to see what might be available for your ancestors.