Marriage is a great experience for everyone involved. It’s one of those days where we can forget about everything else that may be troubling us in the world, where everyone is at their best, everything is perfect. Save for the drunken photographer and surly stepdad perhaps, but on this day even their little quirks and flaws make sense and can be embraced.

If those days and those feelings could come more often, it seems the world would be a better place for all. Or maybe not, because with the number of times people now marry and remarry, those days do come about more often than ever, we seem to be none the better for it, perhaps worse. Broken homes, disgruntled kids and bickering ex’s scatter the Oregon and American landscape little wisps of cloud in the darkening sky.

The marriage records so carefully filed away to chronicle this glorious day are soon crushed beneath the divorce records that follow in their wake. The inevitable remarrying that follows requires these Oregon divorce records to be shown, as do other circumstances such as changing one’s name and immigration procedures.

To relieve the courthouses of the overwhelming hordes of divorcees seeking copies of their OR divorce records, online databases have entered operation, with collections of these documents, easily accessed and obtained. These are the same documents you would receive from the courthouse, though some sites maintain better organization of categorizing of these files to make sure each case file is complete than others.

The county registry is one of these sites, with over 100 million public records to browse through. Enter your name or the name of someone else you would like this information on and search away. You’ll be presented with the complete list of results matching your query, from which you’ll likely need to attempt to narrow the search further, due to the exhaustive nature of their collections.