MOMS is a statewide web application used to search all marriages in MN.

In the past if you needed to track down a marriage record in MN you would need to contact each county one by one. There was no statewide index. Marriage records are maintained by the county who sold the marriage license not the county where the marriage took place. People often forget where the purchased a license.

A group of Local Registrars had lunch one day November, 2007, and started writing ideas on a napkin. This group became known as the Creation Team who convinced all 87 counties to buy into the idea of a statewide index. Buy-in levels were created according to population size of each county. These levels ranged from $200 up to $2,000 per year for three years. While the Creation Team worked to develop the system and train staff in all counties. County staff was also working to enter all their marriage records into a digital format to be uploaded into the system. One year later the system was completed and about 20% of the records were uploaded. Two years later about 80% of the data or over 2,000,000 records has been uploaded. January is our goal date to have all historical data uploaded.

This search engine was originally designed to serve the public but as an added bonus it has been very useful to law enforcement and governmental agencies to track a change of name by marriage.