In a message dated 8/9/2005 2:59:54 PM Central Daylight Time, pauldrake@charter.net writes: If two slaves considered themselves "married", what are the odds that they would have legitimized it after the war? Would they have considered themselves to be married under "common-law"? While researching marriages in Davidson County, Tennessee, I noticed that suddenly there were many pages of "colored" marriages in the time period that I was researching, the years just after the Civil War. It took me only a minute to realize that this was probably the result of pent-up demand, so to speak, for the right to marry. Although I don't know what Tennessee law was in the nineteenth century, current Tennessee law does not recognize common law marriage. Sara Binkley Tarpley