How to locate a marriage or other record showing identity in Virginia circa 1765

Question

I've been researching and documenting my family roots in Virginia for 12 years.  Last year, along with another researcher, we discovered a mistake made years ago by someone else regarding one of our sets of 5th g. grandparents.

I was able to locate the given name of the wife, but not the maiden name.  This was in Halifax County, Virginia mid 18th century.  We have scoured everything we know of online, found no marriage record, are working at the county level now with deeds in the hopes of identifying the family of our "elusive Frances".

I've searched the online marriage records at Ancestry, Family Search, Rootsweb, the County sites all around Halifax and have turned up with nothing.

They would have married circa 1765.  The husband came to Halifax circa 1754 & stayed there until his death in 1827.  I cannot figure out where else they may have gone to marry, except perhaps a nearby county, or perhaps in neighboring North Carolina.

Other than the deeds, do you have any suggestions what else might yield a clue?

Answer 1

Try scouring other family trees for that era and area to see if anyone had a daughter named Frances who would be a marriageable age in the 1760s? Take the most promising ones and see if you can find land deeds or estate papers for the head of the family and cross your fingers that he left something to Frances KnownMarriedName?

Do you know what religion they practiced? If they were in a rural area, they may have been visited by a travelling priest and his records may have ended up in a repository for that church.

I'm assuming you've already seen this, but here is a list of books about genealogy in Halifax county: https://www.familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/Halifax_County,_Virginia_Genealogy