Divorce and Annulments
Divorce is the ending of a marriage before either of the partner's have died. After a divorce people are allowed to marry again. This page needs sorting into a proper article....
Bigamy and Annulments
Before either party involved in a bigamous marriage could remarry, they had to apply for a declaration of nullity (ie have a court decide that they were indeed correct that the marriage had been bigamous). Obviously any guilty party might have to do more than this to free themselves for another marriage, but that's not the issue here!
If you want to get a copy of a decree absoulte then you need to get in touch with:
The Principal Registry of the Family Division" (PRFD) who have the responsibility for maintaining the index of all Decrees Absolute (Divorce and Annulments) in England and Wales.
Their adddress is:
The Court Service
Principal Registry of the Family Division
Decree Absolute Searches Room 2.03
First Avenue House
42-49 High Holborn
London
WC1V 6NP
Telephone number: 020 7947 7016
An annulment originates from Catholicism (who do not permit divorce) but they are able to get around this by finding some (supposed) snag in the original arrangements which allows them to declare that the marriage was not valid on the first place and so can be annuled.
Annulments can be a "Catholic thing", but it is still an annulment if someone is able to obtain a declaration of nulity, because a marriage was illegal at the time it took place.
Catholics can have marriages annulled on various grounds. These have been tightened up in the last few decades.
The marriage can be annulled if it was considered that one or both parties entered into the marriage wrongly. So if a girl was forced to marry by her parents, or if one party failed to tell the other something that would have stopped the marriage or other such factors.
If a Catholic marriage is annulled, you then get a civil divorce to make everything legal such as property, money etc.
A person who has had a marriage annulled can then "remarry" within the rites of the church. However, when a person just gets a civil divorce they cannot "re-marry" within the rites of the Church.
An official annulment is granted by a court so is a civil matter.
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Sometimes Catholic priests will "officiate" at marries without the rites of the church. This is usually "frowned" on by the powers that be, but does happen.
These marriages are legal, as all Catholic preists are also able to perform marriage ceremonies in the eyes of the law.
In ghd UK there is a slight difference because if the grounds for the religious annulment were something accepted as making the marriage illegal by the civil system (such as bigamy), you couldn't get a divorce, but would have to get a declaration of nullity instead because you were never properly married.
It would only be if the religious reason was not accepted in civil law that a divorce would be required before a person could remarry.
This promises to be an interesting thread for me...
My paternal grandparents married in 1911 and, in 1917, my grandfather "went off to WW1 and never came back". (Some rumour of having not come back, not because of death but because he'd gone to USA. ) My grandmother married again in 1923, Dec quarter (haven't got the cert yet). Presumably, she must have gone through the desertion/declared-dead route.
On Monday morning, I received, through the post, a photocopy of the 1936 USA social security number application of someone who was either my grandfather or his Doppelganger (DoB, area of birth in UK, signature characteristics, deduced parentage) . According to an e-friend, she has found him in the 1930 census "with a spouse". She found the match when the link was still speculative and I was discounting it because he had an extra initial, but it matches the extra middle name (not a common one) in the SSN application, so I'm pretty confident.
Illegal Marriages
Do you want to know if your rellies broke the law by marrying someone they should not!
If so, then go to Prohibited Marriages to see who could and could not marry who!
