Caribbean Marriage Index 1591-1905

The information you see in the Caribbean Marriage Index will depend upon the date of the record and the place it is from. Generally speaking, the more modern records have more detail than the very earliest ones from the 16th and 17th centuries. As a minimum, you should see the following information:

• First name(s)

• Last name

• Marriage date

• Spouse’s first name(s)

• Spouse’s last name(s)

• Marriage place

This record set is an index only, without images of the original documents. It was created many years ago by volunteers using handwritten and sometimes hard-to-read microfilms of the originals, and is known to contain some errors.

This Caribbean collection contains a miscellany of marriage records from multiple sources for some of the islands in the West Indies. There are over 113,000 records from Barbados, 49,000 from the Dominican Republic and small quantities from such countries as Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica and Puerto Rico.

Note that some administrative terms may have different meanings in different contexts. For example, in Jamaica a parish is a unit of local government – in other words, it has a civil rather than ecclesiastical meaning (even though some of the parishes are named after Anglican churches). This also means that, in this sense, a parish in Jamaican contains within it many ecclesiastical parishes. Similarly, in Barbados, all the parishes, which are named after the mother churches of the main ecclesiastical churches, serve local government functions. As with Jamaica, a Barbadian parish may cover several Anglican ecclesiastical parishes. On both islands, therefore, the meaning of “parish” is different to that in, for example, Britain or North America.