Marriage and divorce are, in most jurisdictions, recorded in public registers that are openly searchable. The marriage register includes names, dates, witnesses, addresses, sometimes occupations and parental information. The divorce record, where public, includes the parties, the date, the basis, the court, and the outcome.

These are among the most durable records produced by ordinary life, and among the most frequently consulted in any considered enquiry. They are routinely used to verify identity, to establish relationships, to trace genealogies, and to locate people whose name has changed. They are also, less helpfully, the starting point for assembling a private life from public sources.

The information they contain is, by design, not obscure. A spouse's name, a parental address at the time of marriage, a witness who turns out to have been a close friend, a recorded occupation that locates a moment in a career: each is durable, each is searchable, each connects to other records that share fields with it.

Where the marriage or divorce occurred in a jurisdiction with stricter publication rules, the exposure is narrower. Where it occurred in a jurisdiction with broad publication, the record may be one of the most precisely locating documents in the principal's life. Cross-jurisdictional matters often combine both.

Outright suppression of the record is rarely available. What is available is the careful management of the references to it elsewhere: in directories, profiles, archived announcements, and the commercial databases that combine these into a single picture. The legal record continues; the picture that surrounds it can usually be made more accurate.