The recorded history of marriage in California is long and encompasses a period as far back as the first Spanish missions and even further back in unrecorded history of Indigenous Californians and their marriage history.
California Native American period
While the Native Americans of California did not document their culture in the same way western civilization did, we still have a great deal of knowledge from archaeological evidence as well as the earliest records of the Spanish missions.
Native communities in southern California of the Chumash Indians, practiced Matrilocal residence. The husband would move to the community of the wife. The exception to this rule being the chief, whose wife would move to live with the chiefs community. The chief was also the only one of the community with the option of multiple marriage.
Jesuit Missionary period 1697–1767
The founding of the California missionary system by the Spanish began in 1697 located in Baja with the founding of Nuestra Senora de Loreto. Several times during the Jesuit period, Indians revolted against church doctrine against polygamy.
Clemente Guillen, S. J., of Delores mission in Baja California reported in 1744 that he had destroyed the tables and paraphernalia of the Indian shaman and that same year Joseph de Torres Pereas noted the survival of marriage ceremonies indicated that shaman had been convincing adults not to accept baptism.
California natives and the Spanish missions, 1785–1810
While the Franciscan Missions strived to incorporate the native California Indians into their fold, they worked hard to eliminate all marriage and family customs the Spanish Catholic Church disapproved of or found repugnant.
The church was anxious to legitimize the marriages of natives through Catholic ceremonies. Northern California Missions recorded the marriage of 2300 marriages of Native Americans previously joined by native custom with five thousand new unions and ten thousand neophyte widows and widower remarried.
Marriage between native Indian woman and Spanish men was encouraged by the California missions to increase the population and Spanish political power. Rape and other forms of violence was however a concern. Spanish Soldiers and settlers of a patriarchal colonial society put native woman in a vulnerable state.
Author, Charles Francis Saunders has documented the details of a California Mission wedding ceremony from the 1890s in his book, "Capistrano Nights – Tales of a California Mission Town".
1829 Carrillo-Fitch elopement
In 1829 a controversy erupted when the Spanish Governor was asked to intervene in the marriage between a local San Diego Spanish woman and a foreigner.
Maria Antonia Natalia Elija Carrillo was born November 27, 1810. Called Josefa, after her grandmother, she was the eldest of thirteen children born to Maria Ygnacia Lopez and Joaquin Victor Carrillo. Influential and socially well connected, the family was related to several other prominent Californians of the day. At the time the youth of California were pressured to marry early.
Instead of marrying another Californian, Carrillo fell in love with American merchant seaman, Henry Delano Fitch. Fitch formally requested the hand of Maria Antonia in 1827.
On April 15, 1829, the ceremony was in progress, but was stopped by order of Governor Jose Maria Echeandia. It is believed that the Governor was enraged by Carrillo's choice of a man who refused to naturalize as a citizen, as well as rumored smuggling activity.
The couple eloped in Valparaiso Chile and upon returning to California 1830, Echeandia announced the marriage as "Illegal" and had Fitch imprisoned and placed Carrillo in Deposito, the practice of separating couples to ascertain if they married of their own accord.
Carrillo was held in San Gabriel and Fitch in Monterrey. In December 1830, ecclesiastic authorities found the marriage valid but not legitimate under canon law. To end the scandal, the couple was ordered to pay penance in the order of attending special mass and reciting prayer.