Wren Kin

Over at the Wren Family Surname Forum at Genforum, I found this statement:

It is said Randolph Wren signed off on the marriage of Binns Jones Wren and Elizabeth Betsy Depew in Kentucky. I have never been able to document this information.

The record of this marriage may be found in the book Warren County, Kentucky marriages, 1797-1851: from the original marriage bonds and consents, by Helen Thomas, Mary Rabold, Elizabeth Price (Bowling Green, Ky. c1970).

(Some interesting background on this book: Mrs. Thomas found the original marriage contracts in the trash—if I remember the story correctly—and rescued them. She and Mrs. Rabold and Mrs. Price abstracted the contracts and published them in this book, thereby saving a segment of Warren County’s genealogical history for future generations. Hooray for Mrs. Thomas!)

This book of marriage contract abstracts is an incredible resource, to be sure, but the researcher trying to document the Binns Jones Wren marriage wanted to be absolutely certain of the facts.

I have come across this data before. But I was wondering have you seen (either online or in person) this actual document? (Warren County, Kentucky marriages, 1797-1851 ) Is there somewhere I can I view the document?

It’s something every family researcher should do: let the abstracts and transcriptions reveal the location of the original record, and then hunt down the original and read it for themselves.

So where were the original Warren County, Kentucky marriage bonds, the ones Helen Thomas abstracted for her book? After abstracting the records, did she return them to the County Clerk’s office? Donate them to a library? Give them to her local genealogical society to maintain?

A quick Google search found this Rootsweb thread, in which a poster says that the original marriage contracts are currently in the Manuscripts Room of the Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

Excellent! I phoned the WKU library and spoke with a helpful librarian who said the Manuscripts Room did contain the marriage contracts abstracted in Helen Thomas’ book, but horror of horrors, not all of them.

According to the librarian, before the original marriage contracts were donated to the library, the authors of the book gave some of the contracts to descendants who asked for them. Ugh!

How will descendants of the couples mentioned within these missing Warren County documents ever locate the originals now? Abstracts are better than nothing, but the original documents are the gold standard in genealogy. Any contracts given to individual researchers are now lost to other descendants.

As a family researcher, I understand the desire to own an original ancestral document, especially if I didn’t believe the collection would ever make it into a library. But I see far too many family Bibles, photographs and documents sold by estate liquidators to trust in my own mortality. If a library can take the documents and keep them safe and available to other researchers, then that is the best place to put them.

With that in mind, what do you do if you need a copy of an original Warren County, Kentucky marriage contract from 1797-1851?

The WKU librarian recommended researchers try email contact first:

1. Name up to five marriage contract requests
2. Include the names of the couple mentioned in Helen Thomas’ book and the date they were married, and
3. the page in Helen Thomas’ book the marriage abstract was found on, if possible. Then
4. email this request to Amanda Hardin.

The staff will determine if they have the record or not and email you back with an estimate of photocopying costs. At the time of this writing the costs are minimal: ten cents per one-sided copy (twenty cents for double-sided) and $1.25 for postage.

When you order the photocopies, specify whether or not you want front and back, and any attachments (some marriage contracts do have attachments). In the case of Binns J. Wren, there are four pages to be photocopied, which would come out to a total of $1.65.

Amanda asked that the check be made out to Manuscripts & Folklife Archives and sent to:

Amanda L. Hardin, Archival Assistant
Manuscripts/Folklife Archives
1906 College Heights Blvd. #11092
Western Kentucky University
Bowling Green, KY 42101-1092

And if you live in Bowling Green, Kentucky, consider volunteering your services to the Manuscript Room at the WKU library. The librarian said the marriage contracts would be the first of their collection to be digitized if they had the funding. They do have the equipment to digitize the collection, but no money for labor costs.

This sounds like an excellent project for the local Bowling Green genealogical society. (As it turns out, the local genealogical society did organize the contracts when they first arrived, but now the collection needs to go digital!)