Intentions to Marry, 1911 Canterbury, Otago, Chatham Islands

The 1854 Marriage Act required Pakeha settlers (and later Maori) to register their intention to marry from 1855. The resulting Notices of intention to marry were sent by the district registrars to the Registrar-General of Births, Deaths and Marriages and bound into large volumes, each containing a year of notices. These registers were eventually deposited with Archives New Zealand.

A typical Intention to Marry notice records:

• the bride and groom's full names
• occupation of the groom (and sometimes the bride)
• their ages
• district where the marriage would take place
• how long they had resided in the district
• Where the marriage would take place (eg, a specific church)
• Who would officiate the marriage (eg, a minister)
• The date of the notice and also a date when the certificate was issued. Marriages had to take place within 3 months, and usually occurred within a week or so of the certificate date.
• If one of the parties was under 21, a parent who consented to their marriage was usually specified

These details can provide clues for genealogical and historical research. Knowing the date and district makes it easier to look for wedding notices in Papers Past, and the amount of time that the parties had resided in a district can offer clues to whether a person was born in NZ, or when they immigrated.

The transcribed ITM records here have been cross-referenced with the registered marriages at DIA Births, Deaths and Marriages.

This project aims to transcribe the New Zealand Intentions to Marry registers (from 1855 to 1950) with the assistance of new technology (AI), making the records freely available and easily searchable.

Primary digitisation of registers between 1855 and 1926 is now complete. Our digitisation volunteers are now working on verifying the currently digitised pages against printed district/page indexes, to identify pages which may have been missed or out of focus. These pages can be re-imaged as required.

The project is led by Luke Howison, a web developer who made the free genealogical research search tool NZ Ancestor Search Helper and Archway-style Collections Search. There are also some wonderful volunteers assisting with digitising the registers.

You can sign up to correct errors in the transcribed records and match ITMs with registered marriages.

You can also support this project by ☕ Buying us a coffee 🌳

There are several steps to digitising and transcribing the records:

• Digitising the registers (taking clean, straight, high-quality photos)
• Processing the digitised pages by straightening, cropping and sharpening the images
• Transcribing each page with a combination of AI tools
• Matching each ITM with a registered marriage when possible
• Human verification of the transcribed information

The main AI models used are the Google Gemini models, which have excellent 'Vision' capabilities, and a generous free tier.

Under the 1854 Marriage Act (and its 1880 amendment):

• At least one party had to live in the district for 3 days before filing a Notice of Intention to Marry (which cost 2 shillings and sixpence).
• Marriage certificates were generally issued to the couple immediately for £1 (about $150 today). If one person was under 21, had never been married, and lacked parental consent, they had to pay 5 shillings and wait 14 days to see if anyone objected.
• Weddings had to happen within 3 months of the notice date. Ceremonies had to take place between 8am and 4pm, with "open doors," and in front of at least two witnesses.
• Couples could pay £3 (about $500 today) for a non-religious wedding performed by the Registrar
• Officiants had to log the marriage in their register book. Forgetting to do this carried a fine of £50 (around $7,500 today). They also had to send quarterly copies to the Registrar-General in Wellington, with a £10 fine (around $1,500) for failing to do so.

In Wellington, the Registrar-General's office logged all solemnised marriages in registers called folios, giving each marriage a Folio Number which links to a specific page and year. From 1863, officials recorded these Folio Numbers on the original Intention to Marry notices, using the usually-blank "Other district" column. The folio number makes it easy to see which marriages were solemnised.

Did you know?

• The sample paperwork in the Marriage Act 1854 feaures a generic couple named James Smith and Mary Green.
• The text of the Act does not specify that a marriage had to be between a man and a woman. This assumption was enshrined in centuries-old English Common Law.

Archives NZ has released the register years they have digitised (1865-69, 1872, 1874 and 1880) under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.

The Intention to Marry registers (up to 1925) are more than 100 years old, so their Crown Copyright has expired, putting them in the public domain. This also applies to any 'mechanical reproductions' (eg, pictures or photocopies) of their content without substantial alteration.

Intention to Marry registers from 1926 onwards are less than 100 years old and still covered by Crown Copyright. The page images of post-1925 registers are published here with permission from Archives NZ.

The transcribed records on this website are released under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal license, which allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, even for commercial purposes, while giving credit to the creator (NZ Intentions to Marry Project).