Duplicate Copies of Government Records are Always an Asset

I am currently putting together a lecture regarding searching your family tree and utilizing the chain migration patterns to discover the place of origin and parents’ names of your Irish immigrant. My two main example families were the Buckleys and allied families from County Cork to New York City and the Corr and Loye families that settled in Omaha when then emigrated from County Armagh. 

I had lots of trouble with the microfilm readers and scanner at the Omaha Public Library trying to obtain clean images to post in my slideshow presentation. Thankfully, a discovery came my way regarding these records. The microfilm records at my local public library for marriages contained marriage licenses and certificates on a single record. 

Unbeknownst to me was the fact that these records must have been duplicate transcriptions of the original records created in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I was looking at other records on my Ancestry tree and found clean, easily downloadable images of these marriage documents online. There were also records that included the affidavit filed by the groom with a different registration of the marriage license and certificate. Comparing these duplicate recordings enables a researcher to verify the spelling or handwriting. Sometimes the transcription process is not complete and it is only by viewing both sets of documents that the full discovery of information on an ancestor or collateral can be made.