Genealogy Chat

I've heard stories about my family and now on checking them have often found that there is an element of truth. Or, the story is true but happened to someone else in the family and in one case of a child who died in a fire on my maternal side when I have always been told it was on my paternal side. Very confusing. Linda

So very true!!! We have an ancestor where 1. her husband is apparently a widow on 1890 US census 2. US death records reckon she died in 1892 3. gravestone says 1894 You choose ............!!!! lol! Bev x

I can`t find my great, great grandmother`s birth to the parents stated on her marriage cert. There is another one about the same year to different parents. I don`t know if original parents died and she was adopted by parents on cert or she was never registered at all. I have her marriage, death and choldrens births but not her birth. It was about 1842 in Scotland -her name is MARY RATTRAY. Rosalyn

To Err is human..... However let us get all this into some perspective. Most of us who have done Family History for a few years should know by now that lateral thinking is very important to obtaining the true facts on our Family History. Yes I have found errors in death certs and marriage certs etc and 'stories' have grains of truth but nothing beats those mistakes made by those people who do NOT resort to Certificates at all. Recently I gave much of my family tree to someone on this site who informed me'very knowledgably' that a certain ancestor of mine from Northants was married to his wife's relative Eliza A F........ from Grt Dunmow Essex and was b about 1865/6. I had seen the census and noted my ancestor was married to an Eliza A from Grt Dunmow Essex and according to the census was b about 1865/6. He was not main line and I had not got the Marriage Cert but accepted he knew what he was talking about. Hm... Mistake number 1! It was his main line. He SHOULD have had the marriage Cert which would have put him right. Just recently I decided to check this out for myself, and after perusing Free BMD and obtaining Marriage Cert and Birth Cert of one of children I discovered everything correct on Certs, accept that my ancestor had married an Eliza Go...... from Grt Dunmow Essex who was b about 1865/6 and not an Eliza F from Grt Dunmow akso born around the same year. Now this other person has a very wrong tree, and did apologise for leading me up the garden path and said that 'This sort of thing is always happening!' Well if you do NOT check certs then yes it will happen to you. Who will check his false information if it falls into wrong hands?? I have pointed the mistakes out to him but he has not removed the incorrect names from his tree!! The Moral of this story is you do NEED the certs but the certs also need to be looked at carefully. Janet

I agree, Jess, that you don't hear the 'normal' things. People tell you what is special or different or important or a complete smoke screen to keep you away from the truth. You don't hear 'of course they never moved much in those days' quite so much as you used to, as most of us have found ancestors prepared to move at the drop of the hat. I suspect that 'he died in the bed he was born in' was so unusual an occurrence that it was repeated and we took the exception as the norm. All those stories we heard of Granny Lanning, but nobody told us about the life of Granny Wall - the woman who told the stories, who lost her mother when she was very young, lost her huband when she had a young family, and then lost daughter and son in law within a few months and was landed in old age with another family to bring up. Her experiences were clearly unremarkable and so are lost.

I'd say the most relyable document that you can come across that contains written records, and one on which you can more often than not rely , is the family bible. The least relyable being ''its an old family story'' - probably a fairy tale then to cover the truth, to otherwise why is something which was 'Normal' a legendary fact(someone made an 'issue' out if it probably) jess x

Abbess Yes, you are right, often there's truth in the tale, it just gets mangled in the telling. nell

Think of the number of times there is an error 'on the computer' and the extreme difficulty there is in amending it. If anything can be recorded correctly, than it can be recorded incorrectly. I've just tried to get on site with the wrong email address, so am feeling sore. On the other hand, discount nothing. The gravestones I ignored 'Just because it's the same name, it doesn't mean we're related'. The 'money lost in Chancery' story that I pooh-poohed - I found the guy who got the goods. Best friend's grandfather used to tell us the tallest tales, which we listened to with awe and incredulity. I know some of the stories of 'Great Granny Lanning' as well as she does. When we came to investigate them, we found that those that were capable of proof were true. A little mangled in the telling, as you might expect of stories that went back to the 1820s, but you could see where they came from.... the only snag was that the stories related to at least three different Granny Lannings and only one was a blood relation!

My ancestor's gravestone records that he died 10 years after he really did (I have the cert, his burial record and his will). I guess it was erected after his wife died and either the family or the stomemason made the error. He died in 1847 but the stone says, 'Sacred to the Memory of Isaac the Beloved husband of Mary Capps who departed this life February 25, 1857 aged 64. Also Mary Capps beloved wife of the above January 19, 1859 aged 73' Gwynne

You cynic, Nell! [Cynic = person who sees the world as it is and not as it should be!] Some of the errors, I feel convinced, are down to inaccurate wording of questions. As I've said before, I reckon that census enumerators may not always have said ''Where were you born?'', but substituted ''Where are you from?'' or something like that. It's a subtle difference but can elicit a different answer. My g-grandfather was born in Ilford area (1891 census) but grew up in the Maidenhead area (1881, 1901 censuses). It could be just that he opted for the posher area usually, but then why mention the other one at all? His wife, on the other hand, had a flexible approach to age. 1851-1871 are fairly consistent (born Feb 1851); but in 1881 she was only 27; by 1884 when they were married she was, miraculously, only 26! She was consistent in her fiction thereafter. It could just have had something to do with the fact that, when they got married, he wasn't quite 21! One of my husband's ancestral family members managed to age only 9 years between censuses. Good advice, Nell! Christine

Healthy sceptisicm in all things. aARG not awake. Pressed wrong button. Proper text to follow.

I have found errors on gravestones, birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates, census returns, electoral rolls and most other 'official' records. I don't mean mistranscriptions, just errors in recording. Don't believe a word you read unless you've double-checked it with another source. And doubly don't believe anything anyone tells you. Stories about great granny dying in childbirth after giving birth to triplets often turn out to be great granny dying of a boring disease several years after her last child (a single one) was born. nell

it is written down it must be right