Guest List - How the Heck????

We did a mixture of what others said they did.

1. Split the list to have your FH get his family list together (parents will usually know - grandparents are passed away)

2. Inevitably finish his list that he didn't complete...

3. Go through the list and see if there is anybody that the other person has yet to meet

4. No plus ones unless it's a serious relationship - that means inviting the plus one by name

5. No kids

6. Have a 1st and 2nd wave for those who you can't invite until there are no's

7. Stick up for yourself and don't let your family bully you into inviting your 3rd cousin who you haven't seen in 2 years and has never met your FH...

We kept it small. Immediate family, people we would normally buy dinner for and stay in touch with etc. I have a huge family so making the cuts was harsh, but it had to be done.

I love my great aunts and uncles and my second, third, and fourth cousins, but I'm not going into debt to have them at my wedding.

View quoted message Great idea! Thanks!

We honestly adapted the A list and B list method for our guest list. We started out by putting a list together of the family and friends we “should” invite, we let the parents add some names to the list too. Then we went through and put the names of the people we have hung out with/ talked to in the last 6 months onto the A list. Once we did that we had another 40 guests we could invite to reach our maximum, so we added the names of people we have hung out with or talked to in the past 6-12 months. This brought us to another 20 people being invited. We went through and added any serious significant others (dating more than 1 year or married/engaged). That was our A list.
Our B list was the others on our initial list. When people from the A list said they couldn’t make it then we invited people from the B list! It all worked out great and was easy to out together.

I found my grandma and his grandma to be a wealth of information here. They both had books filled with all the people I needed names addresses phone numbers.

I started out with our immediate families, co-workers and friends. Some of the guests that were written down I hadn't met from his side so I was obsoleting them due to that fact. Those you haven't spoken to you in a year don't qualify either. A guide I read said that part. Names were scratched off as we went through to bring the number down. No plus 1s except for 2 people and thankfully one didn't reply back and the other came alone.

I considered how big of a family I come from my moms side and just one from my dads side whom decided that they didn't even come for me. I was disappointed and realized that my uncle was just upset at my dad for not calling him to invite him personally. It did hurt that they don't even call or want to speak to me as much anymore.

Start with whom you want to have present and cousins that your close to and speak to often. Kid friendly or Adults only will be the next factor to consider between you two.

Split the work. He writes down his family and you write down yours. maybe even make categories (parents,grandparents,aunts,uncles,cousins,ect)

View quoted message Were doing the wedding on a piece of property my parents own (80 acres) so I feel like that almost makes it even harder since we have soooo much potential room with no real capacity restraints.

Thank you for the advice!!

What is the max your venue can hold? And what is the max you can afford in your budget? These are the two biggest things you want to look at first.

Then start with your immediate families, and work your way out.

We didn't want a big wedding, and initially counted about 100 -120 people. We then gave our list to both our parents to go over, and they added or took away anyone they thought should be there or not. I think in the end we added 30 people on my FH's side.

From there you can figure out if you want kids, or plus ones, or if you want to keep it to just family. These are all things you will need to discuss with your FH.

Set a date for the guest list to be finalized, this way no one can be added after that date.

I started by making a list of his side of the family, then a list of my side, then a list of our friends. From there we added people we forgot or crossed off people that would put us over our venue limit. So far we are at 97 which is perfect because our limit is 100.

What we did because he had such a large family was list his aunts/uncles on moms/dads side and then their kids and if they had kids their kids. Then we did same on my side- I only have one uncle and anyone I considered family.

We decided to cut the kids because there was 20 of them and we didn't want kids at the wedding- we made it age of majority the whole day.

I did ask both his mom and mine if anyone they wanted at wedding and they got reception only invites if they weren't on list prior. His mom listed about 45 people I haven't heard of or met in 3 years. My mom only listed about 15 but still. We decided to only invite about 10 of them to the reception.

Definitely list everyone YOU want at your wedding first. We made an A (VIP), B (closest friends and family) and C (rest of family, extended family and other friends) list. Then define how small or large of a wedding you would like. We then consulted our families. In our case we preferred a medium sized wedding (80 people) which ended up being our B list. I admit it was not an easy fight with my parents. If I had let them decide, we would have ended up with a 300 people wedding which was exactly everything we didn’t want.

We started by picking a number of sort of what we wanted for the wedding. We said we didn't really want much more than 100 people. So we thought of everyone that we were really close to. People that we would absolutely miss if they weren't invited. And then got everyone's contact info (in doing this we had a few people tell us outright that they wouldn't be attending for various reasons) which helped a lot. Our guest count at invitations was about 135. Now that everyone is rsvp'd it's at 96. So I think we did a pretty spot on job.

For my family guest list I asked my mom for help and for my FHs side I asked my FMIL.

I would ask your family for help! Make sure you cover everyone off