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1791 - 1889 |
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1791 - 1889 |
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| Introduction | Table of Acts | Comments | 1791 | 1812, 1814 |
The purpose of this page is to provide summaries and transcriptions of the various acts of the New Brunswick legislature relating to vital statistics. Hopefully this will help genealogists to understand what sort of records can be expected in different time periods.
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1791(Click here for text of 1791 Act.)
The marriage act of 1791 authorized five types of officials to perform marriages:
1. Church of England clergy (all cases).
2. Justices of the Peace (if no Church of England clergy was available).
3. Church of Scotland clergy (if both parties to the marriage were members of the Church of Scotland).
4. Roman Catholic clergy (if both parties were Catholic).
5. Quaker officials (if both parties were Quaker).The clergy of other denominations could not perform marriages.
The act required a Justice of the Peace to record the marriages that he performed in a book, and to also send a certificate of each marriage to the county's Clerk of the Peace. The Clerk was then to "enter, transcribe and inrol" the certificate "in and with the records of the court of General Sessions of the Peace" for the county. There was no requirement for clergy to register marriages. However, it may have been assumed that Anglican, Church of Scotland, and Catholic clergy would be required by their respective churches to record their marriages anyway. For example, the act declared that the marriage records of the county Clerks of the Peace would be as legally acceptable evidence of marriage as if "the registry of such marriage would be if made by any Parson, Vicar, Curate or other person in Holy Orders of the Church of England, agreeable to the Canons of the said Church."
The act also repealed an earlier marriage act supposedly passed in 27 George III (1787) which was also entitled An Act for regulating Marriage and Divorce, and for preventing and punishing Incest, Adultery, and Fornication. However, I have been unable to find the act in any of the annual volumes of statutes from 1786 to 1790.
I don't know how thoroughly the marriage registration rules were followed. The earliest microfilmed marriage registers and certificates listed in the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick county guides are: 1786 (Sunbury), 1789 (Charlotte), 1790 (Westmorland), 1806 (Northumberland), and 1812 (Kings, Queens, Saint John, York).
(Click here for text of 1812 Act. Click here for text of 1814 Act.)
In 1812 a new law was passed to improve marriage registration. Except for Quakers, it required anyone who performed a marriage, whether he was a minister or a Justice of the Peace, to prepare a marriage certificate and send it to the county's Clerk of the Peace. Then the Clerk had to transcribe the certificate into a county marriage register book and also keep the certificate on file. The act also set precise standards for both the form of the marriage certificates and the quality and style of the county marriage books. The fine for not registering a marriage was twenty pounds, and in 1814 the fine was extended to any bride or groom who refused to sign the marriage certificate.
The 1812 act was eventually consolidated with other marriage laws and absorbed into the Revised Statutes of 1854 and 1877, but this was just legislative housekeeping. The rules, the form of the marriage certificate, and the system of registering with the county Clerk of the Peace were not changed substantially until 1888 when a new system was brought in to register not only marriages but also births and deaths.