When a smudge is not a smudge

Yesterday I was following up research I'd done many years ago into one of the more distant twigs on my tree, to see if I could chase up some more census entries to enter on my 'My Ancestors' page, and in doing so discovered an unexpected error.

There was a son Michael that I (and others) had identified from an 1823 baptism, but had been unable to find anything further about - no death or burial, no marriage and no obvious appearance in any census.

The parish register in question has recently been digitised at Ancestry so I decided to take another look and noticed two things. Firstly, when entering baptism details into the register, the minister had not added "son of" or "daughter of" after any of the children's names.

Secondly, when I significantly enlarged the page image (something that wasn't possible when I'd viewed the entry on film), it became clear that what appeared to be a slight smudge towards the end of the name Michael, was actually a deliberate crossing out of the letter 'e'.

So the child was not Michael but Michal, and Michal is a girl's name! And having got that straight, I was at last able to identify her in various censuses and find her marriage.

 

Brilliant!

I think I've found a couple of people were incorrectly entered into census' as the wrong gender, and a few I have changed similarly and found the records just explode with clues.

My similar discovery came when I received my latest PDF delivery of certs, adding some deaths of my 3rd great grandparents to my collection of certificates of various family members. I already knew about most of the children of this marriage, and had added in grandchildren and partners and all sorts.

As I was reading the details of the death certificates - mostly to confirm I had the right people, which I was pretty sure I did, and otherwise to see if I had anything else to learn from the certificates, I noticed that both of my 5th great-grandparents had one of their daughters as their informants (they had a total of 5 daughters).
For one of the daughters, the informant column just confirmed what I had already added to my tree about her married name and thus her husband and children.

The other however, after I had found the correct daughter (since only an initial was given), I realised that I had incorrectly entered information for her, as the married names didn't match. After deleting 5-6 individuals from my tree who were there incorrectly, I was able to find her actual husband, children and had now filled in most of her pertinent information.

Haven't checked Lost Cousins yet for incorrect answers... about to do that now!