Marjorie is mostly accurate in saying "The date of 1 Jan (yr.) appears as the date of marriage in records from the Marriage Records card file at DPA (filmed by LDS) when the marriage was taken, NOT from a marriage record but from a probate record sometime in that (yr.). It should be interpreted as "married by (yr.)". " The card file was data extracted as the extractor opinion of relationships shown in a variety of documents, including deeds, wills and other estate records (not just "probate record" which is the proceeding probating or 'proving' the validity of a will and/or identifying legal heirs to an estate from the outset of administration of an intestate estate or execution of a will). If memory serves, some church and other records are also abstracted in the card file. Then a subcontractor did extracts from the extracts in the card file, in most cases omitting the specific complete document dates given in the card file (in most cases retaining the year), and in every case omitting the actual source-document identification given in the card file. Then the subcontractor did a global find-and-replace for year-dates to add "January 1" to the year. The card file was intended to be a finding aid for documents regarding family relationships, but has been wrongly described in the titling of the subcontractor database now accessible at _www.genealogytrails.com/del/sussex_ (http://www.genealogytrails.com/del/sussex) . Elizabeth is absolutely right that the database was at one time on Ancestry.com, but when the problems with it were very pointedly brought to their attention they deleted it (a few years ago). The original card file images are accessible at _https://www.FamilySearch.org_ (https://www.FamilySearch.org) . Good hunting, Judy **************************************************************************** ******* Alan wrote: From: Alan Bell <Alan.Bell@colorado.edu> Subject: [LDR] Sussex marriages To: lower-delmarva-roots@rootsweb.com Message-ID: <75EF28A5-EC3F-4D61-88B9-C326EE575881@colorado.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii The list of Sussex Co marriages at genealogy trails.com/del/sussex is extremely helpful. But some of the entries seem, when compared to other records, to be incorrect. In particular, the date 1 Jan occurs improbably often (e.g., 140 times out of some 400+ entries for the C index). Is there some systematic use of this date to mean perhaps unknown month & day, but known year, or even unknown day, month, & year?