Three highlights in people’s life: birth, marriage and death. They don’t come any bigger than that, and not necessarily in that order either. Of the three, marriage is arguably the most volatile in terms of possible outcome. With birth, natural mortality rate is relatively low even in the most backward corners of the world. And death, dead people just don’t revive. Marriage is another story. Married people can divorce, and divorce they sure do. It is surveyed that about 40% of Americans who ever married, divorced before.

Marriage records are a touchy topic but may be necessary to be addressed. Fortunately, it’s not difficult to investigate people’s marriage records discreetly. Being public records, they are actually obtainable free of charge from government agencies tasked with the function. Anyone has the right to conduct a public marriage record check on anybody as long as it’s done through the proper channels.

Public marriage records come under state jurisdiction. As such, there can be some degree of variations in the rules and regulations governing its accessibility and use from state to state. As one of the state vital records, it is typically maintained at state repositories. The standard information contained in public marriage records are the personal particulars of the couple, that of their parents and the witnesses of the marriage ceremony, the name of the conducting official and the time and place of the marriage. Some marriage records are classified as Confidential. Their accessibility and use then becomes a lot more restrictive.

Public marriage records have been around for a long time without much prominence because of the cost and difficulty entailed in accessing them. The quality of the records in the old days was also a far cry from what’s available today. To start with, hardcopy filing and archive was tedious and labor-intensive before the electronic age. Lawyers and other professionals like investigators and court officials were seemingly the only ones up to the task of retrieving and compiling marriage records. These days, public marriage record search is widely conducted as the cost and effort is never a deterring factor anymore.

People conduct public marriage record search for a myriad of reasons and there are basically two versions that are available for their use. The first one is the free-of-charge (FOC) version. By and large, the information is retrieved from public sources although some teaser or bait information from commercial information brokers may also be FOC. These records are good for providing a general idea but if anything further than that is required, it’s advisable to turn to the second version. They are the fee-based professional sources. Many such providers are readily found on the net. On top of public sources, they have the means to tap into private and proprietary networks to access cross-database public marriage records.