Genealogy Chat

I have an unusual surname in my family tree and like to collect all instances of it (for a possible future One-Name Study).

Imagine my excitement when I searched for marriages in Nottinghamshire for this surname in the Parish Records Collection of the FMP website and found two in the mid 1700s that I hadn't come across before (and possibly ones that could solve a bit of a brickwall)!

However, I asked if someone could check out these entries for me before a bought any credits (the surname is often mistranscribed) and was disappointed to find that these two marriages were in London. Further checking revealed that these two marriages turned up whatever county I searched in - thank goodness I hadn't bought those credits!

Has anyone else had this happen to them? Is there any explanation?

I would be most interested to hear from anyone about this "problem".

Penny

Is it listing ALL of the marriages around the country? (I would have a look but don't use FMP)

Jill

Email: [email protected]

(might be worth contacting them perhaps)

Chris :)

I think the county is probably blank on those records so they come back whatever county you select.

You get the same sort of thing when searching for births and specifying mother's maiden name - any entry without one recorded and matching the other criteria entered come back in the results too but just further down the list. With the best one being specifying a common birth surname and putting in a mother's maiden name expecting just the children born to couples with that surname combination and being told that there are over 9,000 results and it can't display them. In this example because no dates were specified in the criteria then all pre-1911 births with that surname will match. You also get the same with first name on births and all unfortunate children registered as male/female (i.e. un-named - usually meaning they were still born) come back in the results too.

Mark.

Thanks for your replies and interest.

I have now checked a few other counties around England (and also New South Wales, Australia!) and they all come up with exactly the same nine marriages for this surname.

I feel that the "county" option on the search form should be omitted for these records as it's extremely misleading - I nearly spent over £6 in credits in the belief that I had found a couple of missing marriages.

I shall write to FMP regarding this, and will post any reply on this thread.

Penny

Mark

Re: un-named - usually meaning they were still born

Actually, stillborn is never the case - a stillbirth cannot be registered as a live birth. The situation arises because the law requires that a birth be rego'ed within 42 d (in England), but there is no law requiring that a child be named at all, let alone before rego'ing the birth.

The old standard b.cert had a special column (10) for naming/changing names within 1 y (maybe it was 6 m) - check your own b.cert.

Yes, I would agree - still born births are another matter altogether.

My wife has ancestors from Dublin. Some of her grandfather's siblings were born at the Rotunda Maternity hospital where it appeared to be common practice for all births to be recorded immediate by the hospital with just 'Boy' or 'Girl' as the first name. All were strong healthy and survived into adult hood so it wasn't a case of the child being weakly.

Whether or not this sort of thing happened elsewhere,I don't know.

Mgnv and InspectorGreenPen,

thanks for clearing that up for me. Now I will have to did back through my records as I'm sure I've got a couple of births for male/female in there.

Mark.

REPLY FROM FINDMYPAST:

"We have replicated the search for WASTIE in Nottinghamshire and did get 9 results however when we changed the county to any we got 15 results back. With regards to you replicating the same 9 results you will see that some of the results don’t actually have a country transcribed so this is why you may see the same results with different search criteria."

Doesn't help when you're searching for BMDs in a particular county - do they expect you to buy sufficient credits to check each entry???

I think that the only way around this is to remove the county-search - at least, you would not then be misled into thinking that you'd found particular entries in a specific county!

Penny