Irregular Marriage

If you find this term in your Genealogy it means this...

In Isolated frontier areas couples were not always able to travel to a church or preacher or legal recorder when they wanted to marry so they would publicly state their intentions and set up housekeeping together and then when the first itinerant minister came through, he would marry them.

This term was accepted by church elders, in Scotland and here in the U.S.A. in the earlier days. The couple was not thought of as promiscuous, it was just something that they did. The children under law were never thought as illegitimate, and thus, the church didn't either.

So in some states now, they call it common law marriage, or even the new modern term, Domestic Partner...