Genealogy Chat

Hi,

I looked up my GGGgrandparents' marriage in the marriage records to find that it has been listed twice. In Sep 1861 there are two marriages recorded between Alexander Rhodes and Elizabeth Horsley both in Malton. One is record 9d 498, one is 9d 497. I doubt these are two separate couples with matching details.

Does anyone know why this might be? Why might it be listed twice?

Apologies if its a really obvious reason, I've just never come across this before!

Thank you in advance, Janine

Have you looked at the actual GRO pages .they are only one page apart so may be transcription error

nope they are listed twice on consecutive pages. I would say the parish record was made out but they didnt marry on the original date intended so another listing was made for the actual date but both have been given to the GRO

just a thought......
what would be the procedure if they went through two forms of marriage, ie RC (religious)and a civil version? would THEY be recorded twice?

Bob

Well i married in the catholic church and the registrar attended the church and married us legally in the vestry after the church service ,the Register brought the marriage book with her with the marriage cert made out for us to sign, There wasnt a catholic church cert ,
Plus in the case of Alexander the page nos follow on so would say these are from the church records and both registrations have been given a GRO ref but only one wedding took place

I think it is more likely that when the record was written out the person doing the recording just made a mistake and when he got to the bottom of a page he filled in the same couple at the top of the next page. The indexes are transcribed from copies of the records sent to the GRO - not the original records.

Kath. x

Hi Shirley,

I've looked at the images. For both bride and groom, the scanned page is a Victorian handwritten index, with two lines of identical entries, apart from the final digit of the reference number. Transcription error does seem likely, but not a recent one.

Janine, the details written into the marriage register, kept at the place where the marriage took place, had to be transferred from the church/chapel to the local registry office (unless the marriage took place there) and then to the general register office. The volume/page reference is a GRO reference number, for the books recording the details sent from the registration districts. These details were then compiled into a national index, listed alphabetically by surname for the quarter that the event was recorded.

My guess is that some clerk at the GRO had a pile of papers from the local districts, to be written up into the reference books, reached the end of page 497 and went home for the evening. They started again with page 498 , forgetting that they had already written up you ancestors' marriage.

I've had a look on Freebmd at the Sep 1861 marriages (without any names in the search). Volume 9d references cover registration districts from a large part of North/East Yorkshire - Hull, Richmond, York, Malton etc. However, they do not cover every page number (the highest I saw was page 703) - there is pages 1, 9 and 11 though. Checking for that quarter marriages without putting in the volume ref and just looking for page 2, it covers volume references from all over England and Wales.

I wonder if the GRO had two parallel recording systems, to minimise transcription error problems? Perhaps each event was recorded twice at the GRO, once into the volumes maintained by area and once into a consecutive sequence by quarter?

Does anyone know what the actual answer is?

EDIT: snap Kathleen!

Wow, Thank you for your quick and thorough responses!

I guess there's a number of possible reasons and perhaps I'm unlikely to ever know for definite!

Thank you for all your suggestions, I think for now I'll assume it was an error when being written up.

Thanks again, Janine