Divorce records in the 19th century can be difficult to locate. While in the earlier days of the 19th century some divorces were decreed by a statewide legislative body, the reality is that most were decreed by county-level courts.
The difficulty is knowing in which county of the state the divorce was filed. For families that moved frequently, determining where the divorce was initiated can be even more difficult. Residency requirements before filing for a divorce varied from one state to another and divorces were not easy or cheap to obtain. There’s usually no statewide index to divorce records, so their location requires knowing the county in which the divorce took place so that the appropriate court’s records can be searched. Initial searches should focus in the counties where the individuals were known to have lived and counties adjacent to those counties.
Some ways to get around this lack of knowledge are:
- Searching for a reference to the divorce in digital images of newspapers.
- Searching for all military pension records of the couple and other spouses they had for a potential reference to a divorce.
- Searching land and property records in the county where a couple owned property to see if there were any land transactions that suggest a couple divorced or permanently separated.
Not every couple that separated got a divorce. Some chose to live apart. In some cases, one or both of the former spouses married again–divorced or not.
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