Marriage has been an important tradition in many cultures worldwide since civilisation began, and particularly in previous generations it was customary for couples to marry before conceiving children. If you're tracing your family tree back through the ages, you're bound to see marriage playing a pivotal role at every stage, when two people come together from different backgrounds and create the next combined branches of their respective family lines.

Because marriage is so ubiquitous within family trees, it makes sense that marriage records kept by local councils and government records agencies can be highly valuable documents for genealogy researchers, especially if there are currently some missing pieces in your ancestry puzzle.

You may not know the identity of your ancestor's wife, for example, or you may wish to find out whether they were married on more than one occasion. One of the most crucial details contained in marriage records is the wife's maiden name, which can often be the vital missing piece that connects large parts of a family tapestry together.

Searching through marriage records used to be a difficult task, due to the permissions that needed to be obtained at a government level in order to do so. However, recent years have seen the rules relaxing and marriage records becoming available for public use, as long as you have a subscription to one of the genealogy websites that offers access to these records.

Like many other types of public records, marriage records are usually administered on a regional level, meaning that knowledge of where your ancestors got married could speed up your search process significantly. It will also be crucial to know some details about at least one half of the couple, which you can use as keywords to find their particular marriage record among the thousands that may be contained in the database.

Marriage records are not the only type of records you can access to benefit your genealogy quest. If you discover that your ancestors did not remain married throughout their lives, or re-married at a later date, you could also track down their divorce records to find out the details for their split. Supplementing your research by finding birth and death certificates could also help to put your ancestors' lives into an accurate chronological perspective.

You should also check whether or not the married couple had any children, as this could be key to completing your family tree and discovering new branches of relatives living today that you never knew existed.

Clint Starr writes for a digital marketing agency. This article has been commissioned by a client of said agency. This article is not designed to promote, but should be considered professional content.