Twins puzzle

Can you give an estimate of how common this is? I have come across this, but only rarely, so I wonder if you could put any probability estimate on it. Or does it vary too much between different parishes and different time periods? Say if you found a baptism that was right in all particulars except for the mother's name, it would be useful to know how much this would affect the probability of it being the right baptism.

I have generally looked for other baptisms of children of the relevant parents and made a judgement from these, rather than looking at probabilities as such.

 

I was actually referring to the example you gave, and from my experience it’s not as as uncommon as you seemed to be suggesting.

My time is my own and I’m the best judge of how effectively I’m using it. I’m also quite happy with my decision making which has developed with experience.

It’s very clear from this discussion that we have different approaches, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not a case of one of us being right, or doing things better - we go with what works best for us.

 

I have, though it seems to be more common in earlier registers. Quite often it seems to happen when the mother is given the child’s name by mistake, so you get a run of children whose parents are, say, John and Susan, then the next child is Mary daughter of John and Mary, after which it’s back to John and Susan.

I have very occasionally come across it happening with the father’s name.

 

This post reminds me of a baptism record that has always puzzled me. I have a direct ancestor named James, parents Thomas and Mary, whose baptism I couldn't find, but I found a baptism to the right parents in the right parish at just the right time (late 1805), but the child's name was Thomas. With no later trace of this Thomas, I wonder if this is in fact James's baptism, but in this case the child's name was erroneously recorded as that of his father? I suppose I'll never know for sure, but it must be a possibility (or even probability?)

 

And yours reminds me of one where the surname was apparently been given incorrectly - all the details (names occupation, residence) are exactly right, and match that of an older brother 2 years earlier, but the surname is that from the line above. Luckily, although the father is an ancestor this child is not.

Another example is where two unrelated children were baptised on the same day and in the baptism register had been mixed up, each being shown with the other child's parents. This was in 1862 so a family bible and the GRO birth indexes were able to sort out this particular muddle.

I would agree it must be at least a possibility. Thomas and James can look quite similar at a quick glance, so maybe the vicar misread his rough notes.

 

I didn't reply to this yesterday as I was trying to think of the best way to express what I was getting at here.

Probabilities express how things happen across a group or a population (or whatever) and may be less helpful in more individual circumstances. So this Twins puzzle, for example, may be very useful for a sheep farmer with several hundred sheep and give a pretty good guide as to how many female lambs can be expected that year, but may be less useful to a smallholder with just 2 or 3 ewes.

Another slightly different example is one I remember from many years ago when first class mail was expected to be delivered first thing the following day. A survey showed that in our area 95% of 1st class mail was delivered before 9am the next day - but did that mean everyone received 95% of their mail on time, or that 95% of people received all their mail on time, or somewhere between the two? As it happened, we never received any mail before 9am so the 95% figure was pretty meaningless for us as individuals.

So going back to the likelihood of two children with the same name being born in the same place around the same time with one being recorded in the baptism register and the other not, and if (plucking a figure out of the air) the overall odds of that happening were between 1 and 5%, how useful is it to know that? It doesn't really tell me anything much about what might have happened in any particular parish, at any particular time or with any particular individual.

 

Yes, I realise that, and the parents (assuming they were his parents) were married in Dec 1804, making him their first child (born Oct 1805). They had a second son (Henry) the following year, who died as an infant, but I've found no burial record for Thomas junior. I do wonder if the name James was adopted to avoid confusion with the father.

Thanks for the advice. I've looked up the BTs for this parish (Great Easton, Leics) on FindMyPast, but the year in question (1805) doesn't seem to be covered, as it skips from 1721 to 1811 as far as I can see.

Being a direct ancestor (James was my 3x great-grandfather) I have looked at this several times and came to the conclusion that his parents were Thomas and Mary Freer who married in Great Easton 2 Dec 1804. Freer being quite a common surname in that area (Mary's maiden name was Freer too), I needed to tread very carefully in reaching this conclusion. There are many threads to my reasoning regarding this family that I've pieced together over the years. In summary, my key findings are:
Thomas and Mary had 2 further children, Mary and John.
James married Sarah in 1827 in Skeffington, Leics - one of the witnesses was Mary Freer (his sister or his mother?)
James and Sarah had a daughter Rhoda (not a common name in those parts!) baptised in Great Easton in 1829, followed by 6 further children
In 1841, James' family are near neighbours of Thomas, but Rhoda is staying with the widowed Thomas and his adult daughter Mary (mother Mary died in 1838). This makes sense if Rhoda is Thomas's granddaughter.
The only other Freer family in Great Easton in 1841 are Thomas's other son John with his wife Jane and their son Henry (possibly named after John's deceased brother?)
I also have several DNA matches going back to Thomas's parents as common ancestors, boosting my confidence that I have the right family line.

 

OK, so maybe this wasn't the best example to use, but it still makes the point that probabilities have a differing usefulness according to the size of the sample.

That's partly my point - it's may be the best information you have, but that doesn't necessarily make it good enough to build a tree on.

In my postal services example, someone may have thought, on the basis of the 95% figure, that it was a reasonably safe bet to post me something that I needed before 9am, whereas actually it had zero chance of arriving on time.

 

No, that's the bit I'm disagreeing with - bearing in mind we've been talking about overall probabilities here.

I agree more with what you go on to say after this, but I think we may be going round in circles here so perhaps this would be a good time to end this discussion.

 

Yes, I'm aware of that, which is why I check the lineage of the DNA matches against documentary records to see if they fit. It's just another piece of supporting evidence in any conclusions drawn.

 

OK, so maybe once again I didn't pick the best example as illustration, but I think you are obscuring the main point of what I'm trying to express here by focussing on that instead.

 

In the case of my ancestor James Freer, he appears in over 30 public trees on Ancestry. None have his baptism, but the majority have his parents as Thomas and Elizabeth, not Mary. This appears to be based on the fact that in 1841, Thomas is living with a woman of similar age called Elizabeth Freer, leading many people to assume that she is his wife. However, Elizabeth is listed below his daughter Mary and moreover has 'Ind' under occupation, which I believe means 'Independent'. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe this means she is not his wife but of 'independent means'.

This confused me for a while too, especially as I couldn't find a marriage for Thomas and Elizabeth (nor any children for such a couple). Then I realised that she could well be Thomas's sister-in-law, the widow of his late brother (I had traced his brother Robert's marriage to Elizabeth King and Robert's demise in 1836). Thomas and Elizabeth may well have been an 'item' in 1841 of course, but would not have been legally able to marry at that time due to the ban on a man marrying his brother's widow.