Re: Interpreting records from Registrar of Births, Deaths & Marriages
FarmI
"Ken" <kwar...@bigpond.net.au> wrote:
>I have just started setting up my family tree electronically. I was
> given a couple of scanned images of handwritten charts & have been
> entering them.
Ummmmm. My advice would be not to use this data. I was with dud
info given with assurances that it was all properly researched when
I began as a young genie decades ago. Now if given info I will only
store it in a folder until I've done the work and know that any
mistakes will from now on be mine and not someone else's.
Details are sketchy & the notes contradict each other.
> So for some key people, I purchased images of the records held by the
> Dept of Justice, Registry of Births, Deaths & Marriages.
>
> One key person was my ggrandmother, Mary Angelina.
>
> I have:
> The marriage registry entry for Peter & Mary Anne her probable parents
> in 1864 (goldfields). The registry entry shows a date & location for
> the marriage, his parents as Oliver & Rosa and hers as James & Mary,
> and the place of birth (Italy for Peter, Tasmania for Mary) & ages
> Peter 23 & Mary 16.
>
> Mary Ann Geline Birth record, 1868.
Mary Angelina is pretty close sounding so it could be your
grandmother.
Shows parents Peter & Mary Anne,
> married in the same place on the same day with matching birth
> countries & surnames as the first document. Shows her two elder
> siblings correctly as to name & age (as recorded later), but shows her
> parental ages at the time of birth as Peter 29 & Mary 28.
A discrepency (sp?) in the age is not really of huge concern but it
might be worth getting the BCs of the other siblings. I've picked
up some incredibly useful info by doing that even though at the time
I was very broke and couldn't really justify the expense. It was
worth every penny in retrospect.
> Peter's Death Cert 1912 - ages right, birthplace right, offspring
> right, marriage details right, but parents as Peter & unknown mother.
Not unusual for one or more parents not to be known or even
correctly identified on a DC. Who was the informant for death
details? What info do you have on the informant?
> Third child is shown as Mary Angelina, right position in but listed
> as presumed dead.
Who gave the information to the Register of BDM and where was Mary
Angelina living at the time of the death of Peter? If the informant
to the death was one of the other children and Mary Angelina was
living at some great distance from her parents and siblings, then
there may not have been no contact between them for year.
> Mary Angelina Death Cert 1917. Parents right for name & occupation,
> age right, birth details right.
>
> I cannot find any other records that match people, place & time. Would
> experienced persons presume I have the correct records but that the
> data contradictions are human error? If so, where do I go next to
> look for data that may corroborate or refute this?
Which State were they living in? Without knowing which State then
it is fairly difficult to suggest anything meaningful.
But some qucik thought - are there any Monumental Inscriptions for
Peter and his wife? Could they have ever been mentioned in local
papers of the time?
"FarmI" <ask@itshall be given.iinet.net.au>
FarmI
I also should have mentioned looking for the Parish Registers on
film and checking there for the birth details of Mary Ann Geline/
Mary Angelina for the appropriate year.
Details recorded there can be different from those held by the
Registrar of BDMs.
"FarmI" <ask@itshall be given.iinet.net.au>
Kerry raymond
It is not unusual to find inconsistencies in a set of BDM
certificates for members of a family. There are a number of reasons:
* people tell lies to cover up illegitimacy by altering dates or
ages of the child's birth or the marriage (common on birth
certificates)
* men lie about their date of birth to join the military when they
are too young or too old to do so (very common in World War 1
enlistments)
* the people providing the information for the certificate may have
forgotten or simply don't know (e.g. a son-in-law as an informant
for a death certificate) or be too emotional (particularly with a
death) to provide the information correctly
* adoptions were informal and the names of adopted children may or
may not be listed on certificates depending on the knowledge and
mood of the informant
* once a lie appears in one place (e.g. a birth certificate), it may
be copied (in the belief it is the truth) onto other certificates
(e.g. marriage and death)
* immigration means that grandchildren may grow up on the other side
of the world from their grandparents and therefore may not even know
their names to provide for their parents' death certificates
Then you get all the problems that occur even when people do provide
the correct information:
* the handwriting is hard to read and is mis-transcribed into the
original registers or into the computer based records from which
certificates are printed these days
* the clerk at the time didn't know how to spell a name
(particularly a foreign one)
* people with foreign names anglicise them
* people from other countries write their numbers differently (e.g.
the German 1 and 7)
* certificates extracted today are subject to current laws which may
suppress information present in the original records (e.g. Qld birth
certificates today do not show the date of parents' marriage even
though the information was collected for many years in the register)
* people are terrible with arithmetic and can't accurately work out
the age of children even if they remember the dates of birth etc
So family history isn't really a matter of "proof" but more a matter
of drawing your own conclusions from whatever clues may be
available. Even "official records" like birth certificates should be
treated as clues. They are simply what the informant said about the
event that then got transcribed and copied and transcribed and
encoded and ultimately printed onto the certificate in your hands;
plenty of scope for errors, omissions, etc. Even if you have a scan
of the register, that isn't the original source of the information,
merely the registrar's recording of it.
As a consequence, you can get the situation where two family members
can look at that same set of "evidence" and draw different
conclusions based on it, as one may reject a certificate as being
"too different" in the details to be accepted as pertaining to their
family, while another person may choose to accept it and incorporate
it and base further decisions on it, resulting in quite different
family trees.
Kerry
"Kerry raymond" <kray...@iprimus.com.au>