Obtaining Historical Madison County Marriage Documents

ALL REQUESTS FOR COPIES OF THE MARRIAGE DOCUMENT FILES LISTED ON THIS WEBSITE MUST BE MADE THROUGH THE MADISON COUNTY GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY, PO BOX 26, WINTERSET, IOWA 50273
The marriage document files may contain up to 4 documents:

     1. Affidavit for License (aka License Application, Marriage Application, or Affidavit of Age)

     2. Marriage License (gives permission from the government to marry)

     3. Certificate of Marriage (aka Return of License, Marriage Certificate)

     4. Return of Marriage (aka Health Department document) gives personal details of married parties

         including names, ages, place of birth, name of father, maiden name of mother, etc.

In some cases a handwritten permission letter was enclosed. Not all documents were preserved and many files are lacking one, two, or three of the four documents.

 Click on the file number in the right hand column to see what documents can be ordered for each marriage.

FEES - The fee for a single marriage document (one page) will be $15.00. For files with two or more pages the fee will be $20.00. The fee includes a $5.00 document charge by the County Recorder plus a Courthouse copy fee of 50 cents per sheet. The balance will be for processing, packaging, and postage.

 
Madison County Marriage Record Integrity: The index of Madison County marriages displayed on this website is taken from Marriage Books held by the County Recorder's Office or from the files of marriage documents. In either case, every effort has been made by the volunteer transcriber's to exactly transcribe the names and dates as written. Despite that effort, many names in this list deviate from their true spellings. There are multiple sources of these errors. In many cases, the transcription was extremely difficult because of poor handwriting and/or faded documents. But more importantly, the names written in the book are only as good as the person who recorded them was at copying them from the documents. Not only did this cause numerous errors but also, the documents themselves were often filled out by someone who knew how to read and write rather than by someone who knew how the names were spelled.

Where the County Coordinators have confidence in identifying spelling errors, additions to the entries have been made in red font so that users are better able to find their relatives. Deleting the red font characters will leave exactly what was written in the Marriage Books or Documents.