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What do you do if?

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ProfilePosted byOptionsPost Date

Dee

Dee Report 2 Mar 2011 18:15

Hi,
I wonder if anyone can help. What do you do if you put in someone's name on the deaths list with their date of birth and you get about 10 entries for the same name and within a year or so of each other but all in different places. I stopped writing the information down on each one when I had got to possibility number 8. If I can't whittle them down I don't know how to go forward. Thanks in anticipation.

patchem

patchem Report 2 Mar 2011 19:02

Normally the date of death is not as important as their birth and marriage. Also, one usually knows the area that they were living in, so cutting down the possibles. If it is John Smith then obviously there is a problem.
Could you explain why the death date is needed?
Thanks

Gwyn in Kent

Gwyn in Kent Report 2 Mar 2011 19:04

Looking for a spouse dying in the same area sometimes helps decide which record to investigate further.

Gwyn

Dee

Dee Report 2 Mar 2011 19:53

I'm really trying to dot my 'i's and cross my 't's. Now you mention it I don't suppose it is that important really! Thanks patchem and gwyn.

InspectorGreenPen

InspectorGreenPen Report 3 Mar 2011 06:38

There is a school of thought which says you should always "kill off'" your ancestors by finding the death certificate, otherwise you run the risk of producing a tree which is wrong.

There was an article on the subject in "Your Family Tree Magazine" and cited several situations where even the most experienced of researchers had ended up going back up the wrong line altogether, because the ancestor their thought was theirs had died previously and they were blissfully unaware.

As an aside, I spent over 5 years finding the death certificate for my ggg grandfather, who disappeared without a trace sometime after the 1851 census, so we were looking at a ten year period with several options to choose from.

We originally suspected there had been an accident at work, but could find no evidence of this. When we did get the cert we found hi had died following an epileptic fit, aged just 41.

There were a number of factors which eventually enabled us to track down the approx year of death, without having to send for around six certs. The main one being that having already produced 7 children at intervals of around 30 months, no further ones were born after March 1852. This proved to be the key as his death turned out to be later that same year.