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Not to be argumentative. My family has also done extensive research on our family tree, going back to the Richmond colony in the 1660’s.
As to laws proscribing marriage:
1913 – The federal government formally recognizes marriage in law for the first time with the passage of the Revenue Act of 1913.
1923 – The federal government establishes the Uniform Marriage and Marriage License Act. [1]
1929 – All states now have laws regarding marriage licenses.
Prior to the 20the century there was a patchwork of civil law pertaining to marriage. In general common law marriage was recognized in every state. Obviously banns filed with the court house would be available as historical documentation. Until the 20th century, however, there was no requirement of certification in law for marriage.
Two issues brought this to a head. The first was biracial marriage. The second was polygamy. Both were hotly contested issues running late into the 19th and early 20th centuries. Eventually states began requiring certification of marriage to curtail miscegenation and polygamy. Cousin marriage was another, though less important issue leading to the requirement to be licensed to marry.

Thank you for your post, Louis Foxwell. Now that I understand you have also done extensive research on your family tree, it's clear you are not speaking out of ignorance, as I initially thought was the case. If you've read the documents and researched the laws, I can assume you have understood what you read.

I am increasingly beginning to believe we may be dealing with a core difference between the older laws of states settled by people from New England and the older laws of states which had a tradition prior to the Revolutionary War of the Church of England being primarily responsible for conducting marriages and maintaining marriage records.

Theology has consequences, and one of them in predominantly Reformed regions of Europe was that the civil government, not the church, was regarded as being responsible for recording and supervising marriage. That was a direct and deliberate response to the Roman Catholic view of marriage as a sacrament. While churches could and did hold “church weddings” with prayers for the couple getting married, the act of marriage was what happened in the courthouse, not the meetinghouse.

While that system of dual marriage ceremonies was the general practice in the Netherlands, Geneva, and the Reformed cantons of Switzerland, that isn't what happened in most of colonial America for a variety of reasons, both practical (i.e., huge distances to the closest courthouse on the frontier) and principial.

The common practice in modern America of ordained ministers serving as an agent of the government in solemnizing marriages isn't an innovation, though it certainly was helpful to circuit riding ministers on the frontier whose parishioners had no realistic way to get to a courthouse. On the contrary, it dates back to one of many compromises between more conservative Calvinists in the Church of England (the Puritan wing which eventually gave rise to Presbyterianism and Congregationalism) and the more traditional wing of the Church of England which won its ecclesiastical and political battles in the late 1600s to become what today would be considered Anglicanism.

Compromises aren't always bad. Saying that an ordained minister acted as an agent of the state in solemnizing marriages avoided unnecessary fights over whether a marriage was or was not legitimate. It's not unlike one of the common compromises in Ulster during the early days of Puritanism, when many of the Irish bishops were sympathetic to Puritanism, and talked some Presbyterian candidates for pastorates of Scottish settlements in Ulster into accepting episcopal ordination while serving Presbyterian churches which were for all practical purposes independent of the Anglican diocese. If the Presbyterians agreed the local bishop was a godly man and held the office of presbyter in his own church, though denying that he had superintendency over other churches, they had no valid grounds to refuse to allow him to be one of many ministers laying hands on a candidate for ordination. In that way the man who had received episcopal ordination prior to pastoring a Presbyterian church avoided a fight over whether he had the right to preach, to solemnize marriages, and to perform other roles as an ordained clergyman.

We can debate endlessly whether that compromise of clergy acting as agents of the state for the purpose of solemnizing marriages was or was not wise in the context of the 1600s. I think we can all concur that it's not going to work much longer in light of the Supreme Court decision this summer.