Last week I talked about my Great Grandmother Mary Louise Smith. Mary Louise Smith married Hugh Daugherty Cormican in Hamilton County, Ohio.
According to the Hamilton County genealogical Society website: "On 24, March 1884 a great tragedy struck Cincinnati. A riot started that evening in the downtown area and resulted in the burning of the Hamilton County Courthouse. This fire destroyed many of the records that had been kept previously in the courthouse, one of which was marriage license applications and returns. Apparently many of the 'older' records (before 1860) were stored in another part of the courthouse and did not sustain as extensive damage as those from the period 1860 until March 1884."
The Hamilton County Genealogical Society has done a wonderful job compiling a database of alternate marriage records to compensate for those lost in the fire. They have an online index on their website.
I located a record entry with Mary L Smith and Hugh Corrigan (spelling) for that date with a code of CT4, which means it was in the Cincinnati Times Newspaper in 1873 or 1874. I contacted the Hamilton County Genealogical Society by mail and they were unable to locate their marriage record. When I contacted the Hamilton County Public Library in Cincinnati, they were unable to locate their wedding announcement in the newspaper.
Some of my relatives have their marriage date as 11 January 1874 and the very helpful staff at the library searched around that date to no avail. I am not sure where my fellow researchers acquired that date, There are seventeen family trees on Ancestry.com that have that date, but none of them have any source for the wedding date.
Strike Two! Next week I will write about my next steps.
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