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Divorce records Divorces before the twentieth century were uncommon and in some places illegal.
Divorce records contain information on family members, their marital history (including marriage date and place), their property, residences, and dates of other important events such as the children's births. Divorce records are primary source records for the information on property, living children, age of husband and wife and date of divorce and secondary source records for information on the marriage, birth dates of children, etc. Divorces are administered in the court systems, so the process of obtaining a divorce and the location of the ensuing records will vary by country.What information will a divorce decree provide? This will vary widely by location and time period. In general, vital records forms usually allow space for the following information but are not consistently filled in by the users.
Divorce records usually contain:
names of husband and wife
date of marriage
date of divorce
and may contain:
ages and/or birth dates of husband and wife
current residence for husband and wife
property of the husband and wife
names and birth dates of children
reasons for divorce
Divorce records
are usually not considered as valuable of a resource by governments so you will
not often find them indexed and may have to do some real digging to locate a
record. They are, however, still quite a valuable record to add to your family
history files.
Next page > Obtaining Vital Records
