Even in Las Vegas you have to prove you are who you say you are, before they allow you to get married by Elvis! Both marriage licenses and marriage certificates are kept on file in state and county archives, so you can search on either, though in some rare cases a marriage license may have been issued, but no marriage certificate ever issued because the wedding did not go ahead. This means that if you are then searching for information on that wedding at a later date, you can be very confident that the personal details contained within public marriage records are accurate. In order for this marriage license to be issued by the local authorities, both people involved have to present a picture ID. In fact, the first thing most wedding venues, whether religious or civil, will ask to see is the license, so they know it is OK to go ahead with the ceremony. Before you can even go ahead with the ceremony most states require that a marriage license is issued. It takes quite a lot of legal documentation and lots of form-filling in order to get married. Sometimes these people are genealogists, researching their family tree, and are trying to find out more information about their ancestors’ wedding, while in other cases members of the public are searching for more up-to-date marriage records, in order to try and establish the marital status of someone they know. Modern marriage certificates are also kept online and some of the older public marriage records have also been transferred to computer databases, in order to help people search online for information. Whether a wedding ceremony was religious and took place in a church or it was what is called a civil ceremony and was held in a courthouse or other venue, there must still have been a marriage certificate issued, and it is a copy of this certificate that is kept on file in local archives. Marriage records are public documents that list all the weddings that have taken place in a certain area over, in some cases, hundreds of years.