Everyone makes mistakes

[JFB]

Durham Records Online doesn't have the baptism unfortunately.

I know. A shame. Being from Co. Durham it is one of my must go to websites, the details that are included put Ancestry and Family Search to shame. I once met the founder George Turns during a visit to the record office in 2016. I was very impressed by his dedication to completeness and accuracy. I saw volunteers with local knowledge transcribing from the original registers and microfilms, comparing and discussing queries amongst themselves; meanwhile George himself was checking previous transcriptions against the source material before it would be put up on the website. Another good local website is the "Durham Mining Museum".

 

[Stuart]

Surely the clip Stuart posted above in #16 was a simple error that was corrected during the registration rather than later. The registrar hadn’t even finished writing ‘girl’ before correcting it to ‘boy’. Any such amendments would have been included in the quarterly return sent to the GRO.

I’ve always understood that until very recently the sex you were assigned at birth couldn’t be changed, unless it was genuinely a clerical error during registration. This could be very unfortunate for those whose gender was ambiguous at birth as they were stuck with whatever decision was made at the time, even if later it proved to be the wrong decision.

You may well be right - that was always the alternative explanation. I didn't favour it because it means the parents gave a boy a name strongly marked as female, and there would then be a lot of other coincidences. However, after a little more research, I'm beginning to suspect that giving child a name like that may cause some of the apparent coincidences. Someone copying or transcribing a record sees the name and jumps to the wrong conclusion, and writes F or Girl instead of M or Boy. The copy of the birth register would then be an example of that.

So I shall keep looking. This is in the twentieth century, so more looking usually does provide more evidence. Sometimes that's good; in this case I seem to have talked myself into a lot more work on someone not that close to my ancestral line! Oh well ...

 

[Pauline]

You may well be right

I’m always right!

Seriously, though, registration errors corrected at the time were just initialled. Those corrected later should have a date of correction and some kind of explanatory note.

 

[jorghes]

It's interesting with a marriage error like this. Assuming this marriage was in England and Wales, and that you are referring to an image of the register rather than a certificate, was the correction made at the time or later? If it was made at the time, then the error might have been in both copies of the marriage register or just the one. As I understand it, if an error is made in one copy of the register but not in the other, then the quarterly returns to the registrar can be made from the uncorrected version, so a certificate from the GRO wouldn't show the correction. However, depending on which register was later deposited with the registrar, then a locally produced certificate might or might not show the correction.

Victorian (Australia) actually - there would have been at least 2 registers for Australia - one at the church and one at the register office. At least I'm fairly sure that's how it worked. So I would presume that they read the father's name from the church register and then didn't look at the church register again while filling out all the sections for the groom.

 

[ChalfontR]

Wliiam Henry Chipperfield's birth is indexed in Q1 1850 ref Gravesend 5 204 but an image of the entry shows a "Date registered" as 24.1.1860. His date of birth is 23.12.1849. Has it been indexed in the wrong year or did the registrar get the date wrong by 10 years, or is there some other explanation?

It is a badly written (or copied) "5" ....... it says 1850