Names joined before?

June 6, 2007 7:36 PM

My fiance and I started wondering if two people with our same last names have ever been married before.

Is there a way to determine whether or not a McDonough and a Colucci were ever wed?

posted by punkbitch to Society & Culture (8 answers total)

i'm sure if you had five or ten years to kill going through marriage licenses in every town in the country, you might be off to a good start...
posted by thinkingwoman at 7:40 PM on June 6, 2007

Response by poster: by the way, make that fiancee...
posted by punkbitch at 7:51 PM on June 6, 2007

There are search engines that allow you to search births, deaths and marriages registers. For example, ancestry.com

I would talk to a genealogist or genealogical society to find out whether they have any advice for tracking down this sort of information.
posted by robcorr at 8:01 PM on June 6, 2007

The easiest way would be to check something like Lexis-Nexis if that happened to index newspapers that ran wedding announcements. Since those are Irish and Italian names, maybe you could try New York area-papers first--the NYTimes has full archives up since like the 1800s.
posted by crayolarabbit at 9:57 PM on June 6, 2007

Mormons are into genealogy to an almost scary degree, as they're encouraged to baptize dead ancestors. I am not familiar with any of the databases, but I believe genealogy.com is mormon owned, and I'm certain there's a few others. You might only get parents, birth, and death for most names, but there should be a way to narrow the criteria to find what you need.
posted by sandswipe at 10:09 PM on June 6, 2007

This is just a curious aside, but I had a great grandmother named O'Sullivan who married a Mr. Sullivan. All she lost was her O'.
posted by largecorp at 7:57 AM on June 7, 2007

You could try familysearch.org and put in the two last names. This is also a Mormon site.

Also Ancestry.com, but it would be harder there to search for two last names for spouses unless you were focused on a specific region.

I bet if you focused on the Boston area you may find one. I know so many Irish/Italian families (assuming Coluci is Italian) and I even know people with those last names...
posted by jdl at 8:30 AM on June 7, 2007

A quick search of Texas marriage's on Ancestry shows several Smith's marrying other Smith's, within the past decade or two.

In my genealogy research I've come across a few cousins marrying cousins with the same surname.

I didn't find any marriage's between a Colucci and McDonough, but I only quickly searched Texas, Florida, Kentucky, and Nevada.
posted by LadyBonita at 10:37 AM on June 7, 2007