Are you sure that "find" is really your ancestor?

Many beginners, when researching their family tree, find a name and approximate date which seems to fit and assume that they have found their ancestor - and stop looking. A recent inquiry relating to someone called William Howard turned up the following entries in the Hemel Hempstead baptismal register which clearly demonstrates why you have to be careful:

It shows that two different babies called William Howard, with different fathers also called William Howard, were baptised in the same church 8 days apart ....

For many more similar examples see 

Right Name, Wrong Body

How should this be correctly transcribed?

How do you think the following place/street name entry should be recorded?

It comes from the 1881 census from the Rickmansworth area.

I would be interested to see if people agree - so make a note of what you think it is and record it as a comment after reading on - so I can compare the different ways people read it.

Which John is which - and the original records can cause problems

Royston

Help Desk

James had hit a brick wall because it was not immediately apparent which John Beale was Henry Beale's father - and it looked like a typical case of Right Name, Wrong Body.  Sorting out which of three Johns was the most likely one revealed a number of other actual errors or areas where there could easily be some confusion.. Our ancestors did not make it easy for us to track them down!

• A James Beale was recorded as Thomas Beale in the 1851 census possibly due to a transcription error between the household form and the enumerator summary sheet.. (Think an unreadable fancy capital letter and compare "Xames" with "Xomas")
• While there may be many reasons why Henry Beale's baptism could not be found it is clear that the vicar failed to keep the register properly, but had a note book and made errors copying it into the register at the end of the year. 
• George Beale's birth was registered and he was christened with his father's surname before his parents married, although the banns were called for the first time 2 days before the baptism.
• The Bridegroom was described as James Beale in the marriage register but signed himself John Beale which turns out to be his real name. The computer index only showed James Beale. 
• The Bride is described as Elizabeth Graves - but modern Ancestry family trees give her name as Elizabeth Cocksett with parents (?step parents?) James and Mary Graves. [Still needs checking out]

More details.

Beware - Wrong information can turn up anywhere

Help Desk

One of the most important messages on this site is that you must always be aware of the limitations of the records you use, and the possibility of errors. One of the first pages posted on this web site in 2001, the Dangers of Internet Genealogy, pointed out that one of the biggest problems with online genealogy is it that it makes it very easy for lazy family historians, who never check anything to bulk copy erroneous research. The important thing is to realize that everyone makes mistakes and misunderstandings. No-one is immune. In 1635 a clerk (undoubtedly rather bored with the job) recorded the passengers sailing to America on the "Hopewell". Some came from the Hertfordshire village of Stanstead Abbots - but he didn't hear what was said and wrote down Stanstede Abbey. As a result of a query some 5 years ago I investigated The Myth of Stanstead Abbey - and how hundreds (and possibly by now thousands) of Americans had zombie-like copied other peoples family trees without anyone stopping to think whether such an Abbey existed. Some people went as far as to say their ancestors had been baptized by the Bishop of Stanstead Abbey, not realizing that if the abbey had existed it would be headed by an Abbot and not at Bishop.

Was John Sergius Fothergill really buried alive? I don't think so.

Memorial Brass in St Albans Abbey

Following my recent post on Harpsfield Hall I got a message from Anthony drawing my attention to the will of John Sergius Fothergill of Harpsfield Hall, proved on 12th April 1836. I decided to look further and Ancestry directed me to billiongraves.com which had a picture of this memorial tablet in St Albans Abbey recording the death of as taking place on 24th March 1836. Clearly getting Probate was very much quicker in those days than it is today. So next I checked familysearch which told me he died and surprisingly was buried the same day, 24th March, in  St Albans Cathedral. This information is sourced to an unnamed affiliate - but the reference number suggests the affiliate was the billiongraves web site.

So I decided to check the burial record of FindMyPast and was told that he was buried at St Albans Abbey on 18th March 1836, at the age of 70, So he was buried six days before the brass plaque say he died! How uncomfortable for him. (At the time he was buried St Albans Abbey was not a Cathedral and the modern official name is "The Cathedral and Abbey Church of St Albans" - see Wikipedia)

So was he buried alive? Of course not? And if further proof was needed  the Northampton Mercury of 19th March 1836 which read "On the 11th instant, at St Albans, John Sergius Fothergill, Esq. of Harpsfield Hall, Herts, in his 70th year." and further searching shows that the same message appeared in the Bucks Herald and Oxford Journal of 19th March, the Herts Mercury of 22nd March, and the Chelmsford Chronicle of 25th March. (In all these cases the name Harpsfield had been misread in the scan, which is why I hadn't found them earlier.)

There is an important lesson here. All records, however impressive they look, both contemporary and modern, can contain errors and while researching you are almost certain to make one or two errors yourself on occasions. The answer is to check everything and be aware that the information you have accepted in good faith may be wrong.

Census Humour - Who was Diddy DADDILUMS?

Census returns

I found an old page discussing Census Humour while reformating pages for the new picture buttons and it set me thinking. ...

The first full census to come out in digitized form was the 1881 census (on CD), although some local censuses (for instance the 1851 census for Berkhamsted and St Albans) had appeared in print. At that time several people reported returns which included fictitious people or inappropriate occupation descriptions which suggest that the house occupant was taking the mickey out of the census enumerator. 

One of these was Sampson J RUMBALL, who was living at Townsend Farm, St Peters, St Albans, and his live-in staff included a governess teacher, cook, domestic servant, nurse and attendant.

The "attendant" was 7 year old female  "Diddy Daddilums", who had been born in St Peters, Hertfordshire, and  the census enumerator had added "(DS)" - so that "Diddy" would be recorded in the census totals as a domestic servant.

I first posted details of this entry online in 1999 and I strongly suspect that "Diddy Daddilums" was the affectionate name of the family dog!

Now the opportunity for such records was reduced because the surviving 1841-1901 census returns were extracts made by the census enumerator who would have had to copy the original returns from the household forms (which have not survived) into the census books (which have) and who may will have censored obviously silly entries.The 1911 census is different. We have the actual household forms - so we know exactly what the householder recorded. Has anyone come across 1911 entries (preferably with a Hertfordshire connection) where, for example, it seems likely that a family pet has been included in the returns? Or perhaps you have found some other entry where the form was deliberately incorrectly filled in - and perhaps "silly" entries crossed out?

Does your family tree contain other people's unchecked errors?

Have you made a New Years Resolution about your Family History Research in 2013? If not read on ...

I decided I needed to blog on this subject when I discovered that the  The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, published in 2006, records that in writing his major poetical work "The Eve of St. Agnes" Keats was inspired by  a chilly January encounter with the medieval monumentality of Stansted Abbey. I found one later online reference, JOHN KEATS_百度文库, which is a Chinese copy of pages from the encyclopedia.

Four years ago I posted The Myth of Stanstead Abbey so I wondered whether the "medieval monumentality" that inspired Keat's was a figment of his imagination. A little googling showed that shortly before writing the poem Keats had visited Stansted Park, a house on the Sussex/Hampshire border. This house was once a medieval hunting lodge and not an abbey, and the "medieval chapel" that Keats would have seen was built in the Regency period. 

So I decided to see if I could find any more incorrect UK references to Stanstead Abbey that have been added to the web since 2008 - and found three more in Google Books, from 1800, 1827 and 1830 - all of which are quite obviously wrong. Now that the British Newspaper Archive exists I decided to assess the truth of the widely held belief that newspaper articles are full of errors  by looking to see what proportion of references to "Stanste(a)d Abbot(t)(s)" had been recorded as "Stanste(a)d Abbey." 

See if you can guess the percentage errors newspapers made

before you look at The Myth of Stanstead Abbey to find the answer.

The lesson of all this is that errors can, and do, occur at all stages of family history research - including in the original documents. My posting on The Dangers of Internet Genealogy, written in 2001, and the horrific examples of the incompetent family historians copying errors relating to Stanstead Abbey onto their family trees without checking, should remind everyone that  it is always important to check your data in 2013

So how about making a New Years Resolution 

*** >>> Now <<< ***

No excuses...