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Twenty years and
370,987 marriages later, Blaine Bake’s work reaches a
culmination.
Bake, a religion faculty member at Brigham Young
University-Idaho, has spent thousands of hours visiting county
courthouses and viewing microfilms. With the help of several
volunteers, he has compiled the most comprehensive index of
marriage records for the western United States. This month,
BYU-Idaho’s Western States Historical Marriage Records Index
received national recognition from Family Tree Magazine, which
recognized the site as an all-time favorite.
The Western States Historical Marriage Records Index was one of
25 family history web sites recognized by the magazine for their
consistency and availability of useful information. Also among
the favorites list were several big names, such as
FamilySearch.org, Ancestry.com and Cyndi’s List.
“It’s the content and information that people are interested
in,” Bake said. “There are no other indexes as comprehensive as
we are.” Bake began visiting county courthouses and viewing
microfilm more than 20 years ago to create the marriage records
index.
“It’s tedious work,” Bake said. Records must be transcribed from
the original documents and then entered into the index. But his
work has accumulated 370,987 marriages recorded from Arizona,
California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah,
Washington and Wyoming. They have indexed 130,000 marriages for
the state of Idaho alone. And each month Bake and three student
employees enter an average of 1,500 to 2,000 new marriages.
“A marriage is the genesis of a family. You have to get a
marriage date and place and then you can build your family,”
Bake said. In the future, he hopes to expand the collection to
include more states and counties.
The marriage records index is the most visited library web site
by off campus users, averaging as many as 5,000 hits a day.
“So much information is compiled by people who do it out of the
goodness of their hearts. We are happy to participate and
reciprocate for all those nice people who work so hard,” said
Martin Raish, David O. McKay Library Director.
To visit the Western States Historical Marriage Records Index or
another BYU-Idaho family history sites, please visit
http://abish.byui.edu/specialCollections/famhist/index.cfm. |