Chattanooga: Clerk’s office provides marriage records online

For engaged couples, concerns about their soon-to-be-spouse’s credit history, divorces and diseases can cloud the beauty of weddings.

“Unfortunately, these days we not only have to go find out if this man is married, we should check his health records to find out if he has any diseases,” said Mary Garth, who recently found out her husband was married to another woman. “We should check his credit records. We just have so many things that take the love out of, ‘Do you want to marry me?’”

To help those searching for marriage records — and tracing genealogies — the Hamilton County Clerk’s Office now offers online access to the county’s marriage records.

The goal is not to help those searching for bigamists, but to provide a service for those needing family history information, said clerk’s office employees.

“It’s been our goal for a long time to be able to do this,” said Susie Holloway, business manager in the clerk’s office. “We just had to get to the point to where we could get the program written by our (information technology) department.”

The search option has been online since the beginning of December, but the clerk’s office waited to work out problems before publicizing it, she said.

The search capability was not in response to Mrs. Garth’s incident, she added. The clerk’s office continually receives calls from people asking if someone has been married or wanting to map their family histories, Ms. Holloway said.

Marriage records from 1857 to 1919 and from 1985 forward are available, and employees are working to add the remaining records, said County Clerk Bill Knowles in a news release. Marriage files from 1819 to 1856 do not exist, possibly because they were destroyed by fire in 1910, he added.

“My goal to assist the public in examining marriage records online is a reality after many years of planning,” Mr. Knowles said. “Genealogists are able to print a specific record being viewed.”

Mrs. Garth said she was so happy when Harold Garth proposed and told her he was divorced that she never thought to check the validity of his statements. Mr. Garth, 47, was arrested Friday and booked on a charge of bigamy, according to the Hamilton County Jail booking report.

Now Mrs. Garth won’t get seriously involved without doing some research first, she said.

“Every man that I meet, I’ll go in there, check if he’s married, if he’s divorced, how his credit is doing, if he’s wanted somewhere,” Mrs. Garth said. “That’s horrible, but you know, you never know.”