Registrar-Generals-Department-Annual-report-1963-1964 — Page 48

between parties of Chinese race, and of the amounts of fees collected. It will be seen from this that the number of marriages registered annually rose quite significantly every year except in 1962-63, which as explained in last year's Report was an unpopular 'blind year' with no first day of Spring in it. The number of civil ceremonies has nearly quadrupled since 1954-55, whereas the number of religious ceremonies has risen about two and a half times. Consequent upon the opening of several new Registries the proportion of civil ceremonies to all ceremonies has risen from 84.4% in 1954-55 to 88.7% in 1963-64, and consequently that of religious ceremonies has dropped from 15.6% to 11.3%.

144. Table XXVI shows the ages or age groups of the husbands and wives married during the year as stated in the marriage certificates. This shows that 152 of the husbands and 2,488 of the wives were under 21 at the time of their marriage, and therefore required the consent of their parents or guardian or (in 53 cases) of the Registrar as laid down in Sections 15 and 16 of the Ordinance. The distribution of husbands and wives as between the various age groups followed more or less the same pattern as in 1962-63 with the 21-25 age group the most popular for wives and the 26-30 group most popular for husbands. There were, however, more than proportionate increases in the numbers marrying under 21, the figures rising from 1,868 to 2,488 for wives and from 99 to 152 for husbands. Many of the older husbands and wives had already been married before by customary ceremonies as mentioned in the following paragraph.

145. Section 39(2) of the Ordinance provides that the parties to a customary marriage may, if they so desire and provided they have not living any other undivorced spouse, contract with each other a marriage under the Ordinance, and that this shall not be deemed to prejudice the previous customary marriage. There are two reasons why people already married by a Chinese customary ceremony remarry under the Ordinance. Either they have become Christians and wish to be formally remarried in their Church for religious reasons, or more usually, not having a marriage certificate that is acceptable to public authorities, local or foreign, they marry in a Registry in order to obtain an official marriage certificate that will be accepted anywhere as evidence of the marriage. During 1963-64 950 marriages took place between parties. already married by customary ceremonies of one kind or another. 133 of these remarriages were performed at licensed places of worship, the remainder at the Registries. The total of 950 was 74 less than the cor- responding figure for 1962-63.

40