Genealogy Chat

There may be other documents to help you track the families. They may have paid land tax, left wills. They could be in manorial records or poor law records. Ask in the record office about what survives for the period. As everyone else has said, it's a question of following both families to find out what happens. Have a look in particular at the burial records, in case one child dies as an infant. With the best will in the world, there are some instances where you simply cannot tell who the parents were. Good luck Brenda

Thankyou for all your help. Sue..................

Do you know the names of any of his siblings? If so, you can look them up and see the parents names.

If it's pre-census or pre-registration era then you have no way of telling, in my opinion anyway. If you can show the two fathers which you found have the same father, then I suppose you can say Father (James or Thomas) Wood, Grandfather (John Wood) and carry on from there but it's not really very satisfactory. I've always imagined that two people with the same name and similar DoB's represented a limit to how far you could go. Your only chance is to find a burial of one of them as a child and hope that the parents are named.

Hi Sue I think you have to track both of them. Their marriage certificates should help if their father's names were different. Heather

Hi Sue Do you know who john married? Can you find a marriage record for him? This would at least give you the name of his father Jeanette x

I was searching in the record offices at Lincoln last week, to find the parents of a John Wood I looked in Edenham parish records where I know he was bab only to find that there was two John Wood born more or less the same time with different parent's so how do you know which are the right parent's.