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Celebrity wedding timeline entries: a six couple sample and filing rules
A six couple celebrity wedding table with the year each entry rests on, plus rules for filing dates by license, ceremony, or disclosure and why counts mislead.
A year page looks simple. Pick a year, list the weddings. The trouble starts when you ask which year a wedding belongs to, because a wedding is three dated things at once: a legal act, a ceremony, and a disclosure. Those routinely land in different calendar years.
Here is the timeline itself, then the filing rule behind it.
What to take away
- File each wedding under the year of the documented act, and cross-reference the other years it touches.
- A year page indexes what your record holds. It is not a census of what happened that year, and the page should say so.
- Name the evidence type on every rowlicense, certificate, return, or account. Two rows in one year can rest on completely different proof.
- Years reopen. Stamp a late addition with the date it entered the record, and never renumber.
- Publish no count. Your denominator is the set of things you happen to know about.
The timeline, year by year
Each entry gives the couple, the year the wedding belongs to, and the document that puts it there.
| Couple | Wedding year | What the year rests on |
|---|---|---|
| Prince William and Catherine Middleton | 2011 | Marriage solemnised at Westminster Abbey on 29 April 2011; the register entry is held in England, not by a US county |
| Kim Kardashian and Kanye West | 2014 | Ceremony in Florence on 24 May 2014; the California license was taken out days earlier, so the two documents sit in one year |
| George and Amal Clooney | 2014 | Civil ceremony at Ca' Farsetti in Venice on 27 September 2014, followed by a religious ceremony the next day |
| Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds | 2012 | Ceremony at Boone Hall in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, on 9 September 2012 |
| Beyoncé and Jay-Z | 2008 | Marriage license filed in Scarsdale, New York, on 4 April 2008; the couple disclosed it later, in a different news cycle |
| Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck | 2022 | Clark County, Nevada, license issued and the ceremony held in Las Vegas in July 2022, with a Georgia ceremony the following month |
Two of those rows are worth pausing on. The Clooneys married in Italy, so no US county clerk holds the record, and the year rests on the Venetian civil register. Beyoncé and Jay-Z are the opposite case: the document is a New York filing, and the disclosure lagged it by days. File by the document, not by the announcement.
The notes on modeling a wedding explain why the legal act and the ceremony are tracked as separate moments.
The three dates a wedding can be filed under
Most arguments about a year page are really arguments about which of these was chosen, silently.
Three wedding dates compared
License date
- Evidence of
- Legal marriage
- Availability
- Sometimes
- Strength
- Documented act
- Filing default
- Preferred
Ceremony date
- Evidence of
- Event occurred
- Availability
- Usually account
- Strength
- Described event
- Filing default
- Fallback
Disclosure date
- Evidence of
- Statement published
- Availability
- Nearly always
- Strength
- Weakest
- Filing default
- Default trap
What it is evidence of
- License or certificate date
- That a marriage was legally made, in a stated jurisdiction
- Ceremony date
- That an event occurred, as described by whoever described it
- Disclosure date
- That a statement or a set of images was published
How often it is available
- License or certificate date
- Sometimes, and unevenly by place
- Ceremony date
- Usually through an account, not a document
- Disclosure date
- Nearly always, and it is the weakest of the three
The disclosure date is always available, which is why it ends up doing the filing by default. That produces a year page assembled out of publicity. It does not measure the year anything happened.
The defensible rule: file by the documented act when a document exists, and by the described event when none does. State in the row which one you used.
A year is a jurisdiction artifact
Where a documentary record exists, a government made it. Marriage records in the United States are created and held at the state or county level, not federally. The National Archives says its own holdings are limited, and its guidance on where vital records are held sends researchers to the relevant state.
Availability, format, indexing lag and public access all vary by place. One row may rest on a county index that publishes within days.
The next rests on an account, because the jurisdiction releases nothing to a member of the public.
The general shape of the instrument, and why a marriage license is not the same document as a certificate or a return, is worth reading before you treat two rows as equivalent.
A year page with no evidence column flattens that difference into a uniform-looking list. The fix costs one column.
Closed years reopen
The strongest reason not to present a year as finished is that it is not. A record gets indexed years after it was filed. An old jurisdiction digitizes. A first-party statement mentions something in passing.
Handle it as an addition, not a correction. The entry was never carried and then withdrawn. It simply was not known, and the honest form says so.
- Give every year page a visible last-reviewed date, separate from the date of the newest row.
- When a row is added to a past year, stamp it with the date it entered the record as well as the year it belongs to.
- Never renumber. If the page ever showed a count, adding a row makes that count wrong everywhere it was quoted.
- Keep the reason for the late addition in the row's own notes, because the next editor will ask.
Counting is the part to leave out
A year page invites a number. How many this year, more or fewer than last. Resist it.
Should you publish a count?
Does the count compare years?
Do not publish; denominator is attention-driven
Still omit; counts get quoted out of context
Your denominator is the set of things you know about, and attention produces that set. A year with more rows got more coverage, or you worked on it harder. Publishing the count invites a comparison the data cannot carry, and that comparison gets quoted. The wider version of this trap is worked through in the notes on year slices.
Common questions
Should the ceremony year or the license year go in the heading?
Whichever is documented. If both are, the license year heads the row and the ceremony year appears inside it. What you must not do is pick per entry based on which reads better.
A source gives only the year. Can the row still run?
Yes, marked as year-only. A row known to a year is a legitimate entry. A row known to a year and displayed as a specific date is a fabrication. Precision you display has to match precision you hold, which is the point made at length in the guide to dates.
Is a year page worth publishing if it cannot be complete?
It is, as an index. A reader arriving at a year wants the entries you hold for it. A page that says plainly it indexes a record rather than a year does that job without lying.
What if two jurisdictions disagree about the year?
Record both, attributed, and say the question is unresolved. A chronology that settles a documentary conflict by preferring the tidier answer has stopped being a record. The boundary is drawn in the main guide to weddings.
