[mikewarot]

I was digging around my home state of Indiana's marriage records from the 1800s as part of my ongoing genealogy hobby when I came across the absolutely brilliant way they indexed information. The marriages were recorded sequentially, and that index number was written in special alphabetically tagged pages with the grooms surname and the page number. The brides surname was used as well.

Generally a new book was stared in each county each year.

So, even if there were an error in the indexing, generally you could find a record in 3 operations, doing an exhaustive search was quite unlikely.