About 27,000 marriages were celebrated in Erice between the years 1422 and 1923. From the records of about 5,800 of these, major information has now been extracted and transcribed, and has been made available on this site with a "search" mechanism.
This means that when "Weddings" is selected, a set of new tables will appear, together with a set of search criteria:
The already existing "Church" criteria can also be applied, or, if it is known, the Casa Sales "Volume" number.
Concerning the "name" criteria, any part of a name can be used, including just one letter. So "S", "Sc", "ud", "cud", "ri" "i" etc will all find entries for the name "Scuderi".
For each marriage record found, a table on the left will show the following data:
An additional table shows the number of records found for the particular search.
If any entry in the left hand table is then selected, the right hand tables will present additional information for the selected entry:
This is indicated by the number of the Casa Sales "volume". As it has been found that some entries have been recorded in a number of different volumes (e.g. marriage celebrated in one church and also recorded in another when the newlyweds were from different parishes), up to four different "volume" columns have been provided (VOL1, VOL2, VOL3, VOL4). Most entries though are only recorded in one volume.
To see whether a particular "volume" has been photographed and is available on this site, insert its number in the existing "volume" search mechansim.
The "NOTES" field contains extra information that has been reported in the marriage documents (e.g. previous marriages or from another parish). (These notes are only in Italian).
The surnames of the spouses have been normalized to the current version of the surnames, correcting Sicilian or ancient versions (e.g. Scuderi instead of Scutera, Scodera, La Scutera; and Genovese instead of Genuisi, Di Genoa; etc.). The ancient versions are often reported in the surnames column of the father and mother of the spouses.
The surnames of the mothers of the spouses are almost never reported in the marriage registers before 1700 and have been deduced by crossing-referencing information from the marriage registers with references taken from other documents (e.g. those of baptisms, deaths, census returns or other).
The proper names of all persons (spouses and parents) are reported in multiple ways (e.g. Paolo Antonio and not only Paolo or Antonio) when they have been linked to baptismal certificates in which more than one name was assigned to the baptized. It was in fact common to give more than one name to those born, but the first name was not always the one with which the person was usually known: this is due to the Sicilian tradition of giving the firstborn children the names of their grandparents and to compensate for the fact that child mortality was very high at the time. By way of example, names such as Giacomo Pietro, Vincenzo Giacomo, Giacomo Antonino could be given to children of the same parents to be sure that in the end a child survived to whom to give the name Giacomo if that was the name of his grandfather, a person later referred to only as Giacomo in the marriage register.