Marriages: a) Those at registry office: Certificates were signed and given to the couple and duplicates were entered straight into the book of the office b) Those in other venues: Original certificates were signed and given to the couple, a duplicate was made and left with the venue. At the end of each quarter the venues (b) made a complete copy of all their certificates from their book for that quarter and submitted them to the local registrar's office. The registrar's office made a copy of all the marriages which took place at the registry office (a) plus a further copy of the copies received from other venues (b). These were then submitted to what is now the ONS. Hence the copies we then get from ONS are by now, several times copied and with each successive copy the risk of errors increases. When books were complete (i.e. full of entries) a variety of things happened: sometimes they were returned to a central body such as a diocese; sometimes they were sent to an archive such as a county record office; sometimes they were lost/destroyed. The only books that should be in a venue are the current ones (i.e. the ones the venue is still using). There are several problems with the system, in addition to the copy of copy of copy issue. For disused Synagogues the books were often stored (badly) and then either lost or destroyed. During WW2 much of London was bombed and many registrars lost their books in those bombings so for London it is practically impossible, in some districts, to get a certificate as they just don't exist. Even if copies exist in the local registrars' office there are further complications: sometimes they don't have indexes so they can't easily find a marriage in an unknown venue (they may have 100 or more venues in their district). Any GRO index data does not match that of any local registrar's index so using a GRO index reference serves no purpose. The GRO index is flawed and as many as 25% of events are either not indexed or wrongly indexed. So, if you don't know where a marriage took place, and when you are very unlikely to find a certificate...I am still searching (it's been 9 years) for my great grandparents' marriage in London some time between 1872 and 1876. To further complicate things for Jews there were also clandestine marriages (stille chuppah) carried out by Rabbis who were not authorised persons (i.e. they were bona fide Rabbis but had not got the authority to marry people legally speaking in this country). They carried out religious marriages, which went unregistered. This was an option taken by some immigrants who could not get authorisations to marry from the Beth Din (usually because they could not prove their right to do so, because they didn't have the right documentation with them). Does this make sense? Sherry (Salford, LAN) Am I right in thinking the indexs you can search for Marriages were transcribed from the original books kept in the town hall perhaps or did the registrar send a transcription into a central collection place.