Modern Wedding Banns?

It was remarkably difficult to find wedding announcements. Even regional newspapers of great prominence, like The Plain Dealer didn’t have them, though it did have obituaries. I had to search quite low to find them, and it reminds me of a talk about the duties of news I once had. Granting it was an old reporter complaining about how good things were back in his days, but one of the things he spoke of was the sense of duty and how newspapers used to run such announcements free despite them losing money because of it. He spoke of how this was a great service to historians. Today this is apparently on the decline, but I do wonder whether it is in the duties of newspapers to service the historians. It at least seems like a worthy pursuit. Regardless, I had to resort to google and found wedding announcements in The Dallas Morning News and The Republican. It appears such announcements, excluding ‘nobility’ such as the Clintons or Kennedys, is strictly local news, and not simply general local news, but extremely specific to the locality.

    The Republican is specific to Springfield, Massachussets, and The Dallas Morning News is specific to Dallas, Texas. The first thing that strikes me about them is that the photos are overwhelmingly of European Americans, while statistically they should be about seven out of ten and half respectively based on an admittedly cursory overview of the US census data for the areas. Predictably, they are almost invariably from the local area. I also find it interesting several are announcements after the fact, making this a sort of reverse banns. In the old days, weddings were announced at banns at Church to prevent bigamy, though I doubt newspapers have taken on this purpose. The publics these newspapers serve, if indeed it is equal to the announcers, thus seems to not only be a very specific area but a specific segment, at least along race lines, and perhaps along economic ones, though I cannot make such a determination without indulging in my own prejudices. The man in the soldier’s uniform might be the son of a multimillionaire, for all I know.

I wonder, however, if it is equivalent. Perhaps sending in such things is a specifically cultural custom. I can easily imagine the custom being descended from the banns, in which case it would be part of a certain religious culture that other groups may not take part of. It might also be that other people go to other, more specialized newspapers I simply am unaware of, confirming the hypothesis. However, I have read many newspapers, and thus become their publics, without even being aware that marriage publications like this were a thing. I was aware of obituaries, but the announcement of marriages had somehow passed me by.

http://www.masslive.com/weddings/

http://www.legacy.com/celebration/dallasmorningnews/celebrations-search.aspx?daterange=99999&announcementtype=1

Sidenote: The Republican has an interesting history behind it, if it can be considered a reliable source on itself. Apparently it was involved in the founding of the Republican party all the way back in the 1850s, back when Republican meant ‘anti-slavery’. Apparently several newspaper magnates and newspapers were strong supporters of the party. I wonder how this fits into the role of media and the like?

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