Lost Cousins newsletter - mid Aug 2023

[JBee]

https://www.lostcousins.com/newsletters2/midaug23news.htm

[Merry]

I liked the bit about William Braddock's death cert which says he was aged 3 months, when he was an adult and it was his illness that had gone on for three months.

How do we know that the original certificate was also wrong and not just the GRO copy? We don't - so questioning how the burial took place and whether there was anything on the doctor's certification document to demonstrate this was an adult seems a bit pointless as the orogonal cert may well have had the correct info. We will never know as London RO's don't issue FH certs.

Does anyone know if London ROs even have their historic records or was their a 'fire' or 'flood' that conveniently disposed of them? :rolleyes:

[kiterunner]

Well, Tower Hamlets certainly has their records because they used to have their own BMD site. I don't know about Hackney for sure. (Shoreditch seems to be split between the two boroughs.)

[NickiP]

How do we know that the original certificate was also wrong and not just the GRO copy? We don't - so questioning how the burial took place and whether there was anything on the doctor's certification document to demonstrate this was an adult seems a bit pointless as the orogonal cert may well have had the correct info. We will never know as London RO's don't issue FH certs.

London ROs used to issue copy certificates, for births and deaths anyway, because in the early days of our research we ordered quite a few from various ROs in the city. That said they tended to be hand written copies with the usual accuracy issues due to the quality of the original writing.

On on occasion I ordered a copy certificate from the Family History Centre at Islington, so obviously a GRO copy, and the mother's middle name was listed as Catherine instead of Caroline. Out of curiousity approached Tower Hamlets who checked and confirmed the original also had Catherine listed as the middle name. This was in 2003. So the chances are the original may well be inaccurate in that example too.

[Merry]

NickiP - I totally agree with you that 'the chances are' the mistake first happened at the original registration, but I do have two certs in my collection where I originally purchased the GRO copy, but afterwards either bought another from the local office or asked them to check the original and they were not the same. One was the age at death - 85 on one cert and 55 on the other. The other one was the father's first name on a child's birth cert - Daniel for David. Neither of these were in London though.

[Olde Crone]

I have quite a few GRO certs with mistakes on them, or at least they differ from the original record.

Someone wrote a book which claimed there are over a million mistakes on GRO certificates.

The David/Daniel thing catches a lot of people out, not just GRO clerks. The names are almost identical in outline when written in cursive script. This discovery revolutionised my Scottish research, haha.

OC

[ElizabethHerts]

I have quite a few GRO certs with mistakes on them, or at least they differ from the original record.

Someone wrote a book which claimed there are over a million mistakes on GRO certificates.

The David/Daniel thing catches a lot of people out, not just GRO clerks. The names are almost identical in outline when written in cursive script. This discovery revolutionised my Scottish research, haha.

OC

Yes, my ancestor Daniel Jeffcoat has been transcribed as David more than once.