Rare 1880s Marriage License Discovered

We never know what we are going to find at the Archives.

Tucked inside a 1920s Settlements and Bonds book we found this 1881 marriage license for R. M. Scott and Eliza Mitchell.

Why is that unusual? Well, this one brings the county's collection of surviving marriage licenses from 1804-1950 to a grand total of 3. Just three licenses survive for almost 150 years of county history.

The marriage license was a piece of paper written by the County Court Clerk and handed to the groom. Typically, the person who performed the wedding wrote the marriage date on the back of license, signed it, and returned it to the County Court Clerk for recording in a bound marriage book. Afterwards, the clerk filed the license in his office. But almost no marriage licenses survive in Stewart County until 1950, and we don't know why.

But there's another remarkable fact about this newly-discovered 1881 marriage license. The bound marriage book that covered the years 1876-1881 was destroyed at some point, and the marriages for 1876-1881 are lost - nothing is known about the couples who married during those 5 years. This 1881 marriage occurred during that lost period, so the information on this marriage license reveals information that had been thought to be lost forever.
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The back of this license has much more than the wedding date and celebrant's name, though. It also gives the ages of the bride and groom, their place of residence (Lyon County, KY) and the names of the witnesses.