Finding info in unexpected places

Just to reiterate Peter's point in ' be alert, be lucky' Just had a case in point.
I have just been looking at the Drake family in Norfolk. There are rather a lot of Roberts but none seemed to match the one that married Martha Ann Canham in 1843. Just been looking at the baptism of the Youngest son George to find that her Husband had been transported. No wonder I couldn't find him. Yet more mistakes will be found on Ancestry trees in that case as they clearly haven't discovered that and have a completely different Robert.

 

MMMm! However, the only record I have found is for a Robert Drake in 1844 age 20, His two sons, Robert born 1844 and George 1848. So was George the son of someone else??? Yet another mystery.

 

Yes, I'm sure he was. The parish register shows only Martha Ann as parent, with no father's name. All the other entries on that page show both parents, except Harriett Minns - who is a "singlewoman". So this curate didn't labour the point about about the birth being illegitimate, but it was clear enough that her husband being overseas was equivalent to not having one. And the GRO index for this birth (in Forehoe district) has no maiden surname, which is their way of showing that no father was recorded.

 

One of my ancestors had twins 6 years after her husband died. She is correctly shown as a widow on the twins' baptism, and one of the twins is shown as illegitimate on her marriage certificate (the other twin never married). The husband's burial isn't hard to find either. I notice some trees on Ancestry featuring this family show the husband as the father of the twins.

 

Usually, but not always - it just means there is no maiden name recorded for the mother. There can occasionally be a father named on such entries, if not married to the mother.

 

Probably because they are making (wrong) assumptions based on the birth index entries. A common mistake.

 

Not in this case, as the twins were born in 1820, so before civil registration. But I agree the birth index entries can be a source of incorrect conclusions. One case in point:

Another of my ancestors (M) had a child 4 years after she was widowed and the (1839) birth certificate has a blank in the 'father' box. M's maiden name is not given (just her married name), so the birth index has a blank there too. Two years after this child's birth, M remarried and the child took M's new husband's surname and is listed as his 'daughter' in the 1851 census. I wouldn't have thought this indicated that the 2nd husband was her biological father, except for the fact that M's daughter from her 1st marriage appears as a 'relative' rather than a daughter, indicating to me that the child born in 1839 was probably M's 2nd husband's daughter. Or maybe that's a wrong assumption?

 

A widow should still have a maiden name recorded , so the fact that the birth entry didn't show one would suggest that the registrar either failed to establish that she had been married or that she didn't mention it when asked. But it is worth noting that this is in 1839 when registration was very new, and you do often see such apparently inaccurate entries in those early years as registrars got used to the system.

Census records (pre 1911) are copied information, so there is always plenty of room for error - I was looking at one only yesterday in my own family research where the 30year old head of the household had a 56 year old widowed "daughter" listed ...(she was in fact his mother). In the circumstances you mention I would say the records suggest that the 2nd husband MAY well have been the father of the child, but I wouldn't say it is conclusive ( but in genealogy, not much ever is !)

 

Yes, I was surprised that the maiden name was missing as I thought it ought to be there. M went on to have 2 sons with her 2nd husband, and on the birth certificate of the younger son (of which I have a copy) both her previous married name and her maiden name are given - but that was 1846, and her husband was the informant.

Oh yes, I agree. One of my husband's female ancestors, named Charlotte, is listed as Charles and male on the 1871 census. She was a widow carrying on her late husband's business, so maybe this led to the error on copying, as it must have seemed unusual in those days for a woman to be described as a 'Drover employing 1 man'.

 

Peter is absolutely correct - you shouldn't make assumptions based on a maiden name being listed (or not).

A maiden name listed in the index just means that the mother is (or has been) a married woman - it doesn't mean she is married to the father, nor that a father is even named on the entry.

 

We are talking about the GRO's online index here, and I think I have to revise my understanding of it. When the online index appeared, having maiden surnames from 1837 was new. I assumed that choices had been made in creating that index about when to show the MMS and when not. That view was reinforced by the GRO's description (in their FAQs document) of the blanks as "data not captured"; that sounds like a modern term.

It now appears that it means they were not entered by the registrar at the time, using Victorian data processing technology (pen and register). That increases out interest in the rules, conventions, and assumptions that guided both registrar and informant (and sometimes the informant's informant).

But I don't think it's reasonable to say "you shouldn't make assumptions based on a maiden name being listed (or not)". We look at the index not only to provide the reference for an order, but to decide whether to order a certificate, and for information more generally. So we need to ask whether what we see looks as expected, and what circumstances might have led to it - a range of options, not a single assumption. Given so little information, all options of the various names being as expected or not have a range of potential causes: that's what we have to be aware of.

 

The main problem seems to be that historically birth registration had no separate space for the recording of the maiden name, so when the new index was created the transcribers seem to have to been told that the maiden name is whatever comes after the word "formerly" ( which it should) - but I know at least one registrar, and there were probably others, who didn't follow that in the early years, and sometimes beyond, and used the word "late" or something else. Those entries will have a "-" in the maiden name even though they are clearly a married couple. I have a number of such examples.

Add to that the various scenarios where a maiden name can quite correctly be present on an illegitimate birth index entry quite a few), and things are not straightforward. And yet another factor is that the on-line index uses different indexing rules when compared with the "old" printed indexes, especially when looking at unmarried couples which means that what you see when looking at old and new can, quite correctly, be different and you have quite a bit of potential for error

You are correct "shouldn't" is probably the wrong word, as we are all guilty of it. I think what I should have said is that we need understand the risks involved in working from indexes and from making deductions and assumptions from them. I see so many trees, especially those on-line, which have gone badly wrong because of it.

I was once asked to check a family tree that had been beautifully researched all the way back to the early 1600s, with all sorts of excellent sources and references carefully noted. But - a single birth in the 1880s hadn't been checked properly and an assumption made from the index which was wrong and so about 8 generations of the research were completely the wrong family line.

 

My half uncle was born before his parents married, but the certificate shows that both parents were present at the registration. The old indexes have two entries for him, one under his mother’s surname and one under his father’s, both showing the mother’s surname in the mother’s maiden name column (it was 1913). The online index has just the one entry under his father’s surname, with no maiden name given, and whilst an assumption that my uncle was born illegitimate would actually be correct, the surname under which his birth is indexed is very misleading.

Incidentally, this is one of several entries in the online index that I’ve raised with GRO (back in 2019), and which has been accepted and the index supposedly updated, but has yet to show up in the online version.

 

A very good example of how the old and new indexes use different indexing rules - in the old written/printed index a birth registration to unmarried parents, but where both are named on the entry, will be indexed twice - once under each surname (as the chid itself has no surname to use). But the new on-line index uses a different rule and in the same circumstances the entry will only be indexed under the father's surname.

For maiden names, the old index (after 1911) just repeats the mother's surname in cases where there is no maiden name shown for the mother, but the new on-line index (more correctly) will show a "dash".

Such differences won't be accepted as errors by GRO - they are just the result of using the different rules, so although the entries don't match they are both correct. Comparing the results you get between the two systems can be a useful way of working out what the most likely scenario actually is and helps to reduce the risk of assuming !

 

I can see that should be the case with the rules you mention being used for the online index, but with my uncle's registration it seemed they did accept there was an error somewhere, and reported back that the online index had been updated. I might think that perhaps they had changed their minds after reporting back, and didn't update the index after all, but this is not the only error/omission I've reported that's come back "Online Index entry updated" but no change has been made.

Or is "Online Index entry updated" a standard response simply reiterating that the entry has been investigated, and that it will have been updated if deemed appropriate?

Personally, I don't think it is very helpful where parents were unmarried but both appear in the entry, to index the birth under the father's surname only, but I guess whoever made that decision had their reasons.

 

Because the indexing of the entry you mention for your uncle does seem to fit the current rules, I would expect it to have received the most common response which is "no amendment necessary" ....why it didn't, no idea, perhaps an error at their end.

I have tried, so far without success, to find out the reasoning for this change - I suspect it might just have been an oversight when the indexing project was outsourced, but can't prove it. Alternatively it might be because working out the marital status of parents on a birth entry isn't always straightforward ( you can only do it from the informant column), and they decided it made things more complicated (and slower) for the transcribers to work out.