Happy Mother’s Day (one day later)! To focus on the great women in our family trees, let’s take a look at ways we can find our female ancestors more easily, using resources in The Family History Guide. This article focuses on Goal B4 in the United States page: Marriage Records.

Basic Marriage Records

Often you can find needed information about your female ancestors from marriage records, which typically list vital information and parents of the bride and groom. In Choice A, see articles such as Finding Your Family in U.S. Marriage Records from FamilySearch, and Types of Marriage Records for Family History Research from Thoughtco.com. Also learn about marriage records around the world by exploring the Countries menu in The Family History Guide, and marriage records for U.S. states using the various State pages.

Finding Marriage Records

Choice B has some helpful resources for finding the marriage records you need, such as How to Find United States Marriage Records by FamilySearch and 5 Strategies for Locating Marriage Records from the Family History Daily site. Also check out the links to the Ancestry videos in the Choice.

Female Ancestors and Maiden Names

Choice C has an entire subsection on finding female ancestors and using maiden names in your research. There is a video series by Ancestry Academy titled Finding the Females in Your Family Tree, as well as AJC—3 Practical Strategies for Finding Female Ancestors by Amy Johnson Crow and Top 10 Sources for Locating Maiden Names by Kimberly Powell.

The Vault

In The Family History Guide, the Vault has a large selection of article and video links for finding female ancestors, titled Female Names. There are links to five additional videos and 16 additional articles.

DNA Testing

In Goal 1 of Project 7: DNA, you can read articles and watch videos to learn about maternal-line (mitochondrial) DNA testing.

Happy researching for the mothers in your family tree!