Everyone makes mistakes

[Pauline]

Looking in the latest newsletter at the birth certificate of a Florence who was registered as Thomas, I probably have something similar in my family. I say 'probably' because there is no subsequent correction.

The certificate I have is for a child of my 2 x great grandparents George Solman and Emma Ainge, and the certificate is for a daughter Alice born 18 December 1866. (Emma already had a daughter Alice born in 1858). I can find no later record of the 1866 Alice, but from the 1871 census and a death and burial a couple of weeks later, the couple apparently did have a son Henry born about 1866/7 for whom I have found no birth record. The 1871 census gives Henry's age as 3, but his age at death/burial was 4.

So I have always wondered if the son Henry was mistakenly registered at birth as a daughter Alice. How or why is somewhat mystifying, but one image I've had in my mind was that when the mother went to register the birth, her 8 year old daughter Alice was holding the baby. The registrar then pointed towards Alice and the baby, and asked 'what's the child's name?', which resulted in a misunderstanding and the baby ended up being registered as Alice.

 

[peter]

So often we see examples where the most likely explanation (and sometimes the only explanation) is poor communication between the registrant and the registrar.

Where there is a failure of communication the person who is paid to do the job must surely take the blame.

 

[jorghes]

I have a marriage register for my great-grandparents where the name of the groom is "John Henry" (his father) rather than "Frederick William". In the margin (twice) it is noted that there was an "error in copying proper name" with the corrected name.

 

[Pauline]

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.

 

[webwiz]

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?

 

[Mitch_in_Notts]

I have a Marriage Certificate from the GRO with a witness Thomas WILLIAMS(X), quiet clear, and the Groom was a Samuel WILLIAMS(X) so possible connection left me puzzled for a decade. The Parish register, when I eventually saw it, has Thomas WILLILLS(X) - this is Thomas WILLITTS, who is a cousin of the bride, but the Ts aren't crossed so it looks like WILLILLS. The person submitting the entry from the Marriage Register to the GRO, presumably did his best guess of what surname the Curate meant!

 

[peter]

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?

Clearly the birth can't have been indexed 10 years before it was registered - nor, in fact, could it have been registered 10 years late unless the Registrar General authorised it (in which case it would say so).

This means it's either bad handwriting, an error made by the registrar when he was copying the entries, or a combination of the two. You can probably pin it down more precisely by looking at some of the other entries on the same page.

 

[Stuart]

This entry is in the original hand-written index from 1850 (on FMP), so the registration definitely must have been done in 1850. So it was a writing error, though a very unusual one.

I think the image is not of the register itself, but of the copy sheet made from the register to send up to the GRO after the end of the quarter. That's why the informant's signature is represented by the name in the same handwriting as everything else. We can't tell from that what was written in the register itself.

Those sheets were the basis for the quarterly index, but only the names were used in that process. If you think about it, the date of registration was not something that needed to be read as part of the process that produced the indexes. Once all the copy sheets were received, the copying and alphabetisation were done for that batch as a whole. And that used the names and the volume and page numbers - the rest of what was on the page never needed to be looked at.

 

[peter]

I think the image is not of the register itself, but of the copy sheet made from the register to send up to the GRO after the end of the quarter.

Clearly the image has been downloaded from the GRO website using the Online View service. But it's still an image of the register entry - just not the local register entry. For legal and most practical purposes it's what is recorded in the GRO register that's important - it's only family historians who might purchase a copy of a local register entry, and even then you might not get an image of the entry.

Of course, the GRO birth register entries should be exactly the same as the local register entries - but, as I pointed out in the latest newsletter, even officials make mistakes. Hence my comment yesterday that

it's either bad handwriting, an error made by the registrar when he was copying the entries, or a combination of the two. You can probably pin it down more precisely by looking at some of the other entries on the same page.

Hopefully everyone reading this discussion knows how the quarterly indexes were compiled as it was covered by Audrey Collins in her 2014 talk (also mentioned in the latest newsletter).

 

[JFB]

In 1950 my 2x great aunt Ena (b. Willhemena in 1888) applied to the local record office for a copy of her birth certificate in order to make a claim for her old age pension. The certificate she received listed her as "William, a boy". See attached; Please note (Ancestry!) that the Auckland registration district was re-constituted into Durham Western registration district in 1937, and was NOT in New Zealand before that! That's a different thread.
This led to unexpected difficulties and further correspondence that was given to me by her son, in which the local registrar acknowledged the mistake but was powerless to amend the official record. See the LRO response which is attached
This mistake was in the local register, so probably originated with the original birth registration. Wow.
Anyone can make a mistake, even civil servants on legal documents.

 

[peter]

In 1950 my 2x great aunt Ena (b. Willhemena in 1888) applied to the local record office for a copy of her birth certificate in order to make a claim for her old age pension. The certificate she received listed her as "William, a boy". See attached; Please note (Ancestry!) that the Auckland registration district was re-constituted into Durham Western registration district in 1937, and was NOT in New Zealand before that! That's a different thread.
This led to unexpected difficulties and further correspondence that was given to me by her son, in which the local registrar acknowledged the mistake but was powerless to amend the official record. See the LRO response which is attached
This mistake was in the local register, so probably originated with the original birth registration. Wow.
Anyone can make a mistake, even civil servants on legal documents.

It wasn't necessarily a mistake by the registrar. About 1 in 5000 babies are born with ambiguous gender, and when this happens it is quite likely that a female baby will be identified as male.

Although it's impossible to be certain after 135 years, the fact that the birth was registered more than 42 days later, and by someone other than the parents, suggests that there was something unusual about the birth. One also has to wonder why she didn't take the matter up with the Registrar General - after all, the local registrar explained what she needed to do.

Do you know who the person was who registered the birth?

 

[Pauline]

This is another interesting scenario. Looking in the census, in 1891 the child appears as William E, son, aged 2, while in 1901 is given as Enea, daughter, aged 12, both born Spennymoor. So maybe Peter's suggestion is the correct one.

 

[peter]

This would make an interesting article for the newsletter - if JFB would allow me to use those images.

 

[JFB]

Hi Peter. A newsletter inclusion would be OK. Ena is long passed away, and so is her son who sent me the information in 1999.
I knew that this would spark interest and theories, which is why I posted it. Pauline is quite right about the 1891 census listing William E. son age 2. And in 1901 she is listed as Enea, a girl.

Catherine Carle who registered the birth was not a relative as far as I know, only a neighbour from the other side of the street.

I don't know why her parents chose the name Willhemena for their 11th child, there are no others with the same name in the family. It wasn't a common given name in the area, only 3 civil birth registrations in the Auckland district on Find My Past between 1860 and 1900, so my thinking is that many people misheard it as William, especially for a babe in arms when there is no dress difference between boys and girls. It could well be that Catherine Carle also misheard the name, or the registrar did. In the 1891 census "William E." could well be a similar mishearing of "Willhemena" by the enumerator.
I think the family became aware of this problem so by 1901, and for the rest of her life, she was known as Ena. On her marriage certificate in 1910 she is recorded as Ena. I have a photograph of her parents and whole family dated to 1892, and she clearly has the dress and appearance of a 4 year old girl.

On the GRO website the birth is still clearly registered as William Heseltine, a boy. If the GRO register was corrected or annotated, it is not in the digital image. Could there be another GRO record of amendments that is not included in the image?
Or it may be that the GRO somehow confirmed her ID and sex for pension purposes from the baptism certificate mentioned in the letter (which unfortunately I have no copy of).

 

[Stuart]

I think you have to accept that the child looked like a boy so was named William and registered as such. The 1901 census suggests to me that the parents had already decided to feminise the name to Williamina or Wilhelmina. However, in 1901 they felt they had to stick with what was registered, a boy called William, and just added Ena. That was then shortened to Ena alone (or Enea as written), and as time went on they got more confident about just adopting the change, since no-one ever looked at the registration.

Since she then married and had children you can work out what sort of condition could have been involved (there are several). And I guess you could call it a good outcome, certainly compared with some others born with these ambiguous development conditions.

Of course there are still some puzzles left by that - why the delay to registration, and it being done by a neighbour, and why they never got the registration changed? And did doctors get involved, and if so how and when? If it the delay is connected to medical examinations, why was the registration then as a boy?

The registrar's letter saying she was registered "wrong(ly)" looks surprising now; I'd say it was correct but the judgement of what was correct then changed. Probably the legal framework of registration only allowed changes of errors, and that dictated their wording.

I'm sure that if the entry had been officially changed, the new version is what you would find in the records and the GRO index. While getting a birth certificate was the standard way of proving entitlement to the old age pension, was it the only one? Could she have made her case directly to the Ministry of Pensions (as it was in 1950)?

One point that occurs to me is about the name. If you said the child was a boy and it was later found to be a girl, that can be called an error, and corrected. If you said the name was "William" and that is what was written down, how can that be called an error? Maybe it was not possible to change names, or only within the time limit for naming an unnamed child - I've got another, rather different, example which shows the same thing. (Post on this will follow.)

 

[Stuart]

This example, in my family, concerns an individual who died in 2003, That is so recent I will try not to identify them in any way. The idea is to show what may be found in the records in such a case.

This individual was registered in 1911 with an unusual name (50-100 per year in the GRO index) that I would say is always female. However, the sex of "G" was altered to "Boy", and the child raised as a boy - I have a family group photo from 1920 in which he is one of several young boys dressed as you'd expect. In the 1921 census he was in hospital, listed as at school "whole time"; it's not clear whether that refers to schooling while in hospital or not. In 1939 the register shows him as a male (and working), but the death in 2003 was registered as female. The name was (give or take a middle name) the same throughout in these records, though I have no idea about everyday life.

While I cannot share the birth registration, here is a little snippet. I have an online PDF certificate, which is an image of the GRO's copy register. The birth was in April, and it was registered by the mother in June - 55 days later. The only correction is to column 3, and there are initials in the right margin but no date anywhere.

This copy register was created by binding the loose sheets filled in every quarter at the sub-district, sent to the district RO, and then sent on to the GRO soon after. At least that was the plan in 1836, and I think still in 1911. The correction was presumably made at the GRO, if only they could do it. I presume that the original register, held at the district RO, would have been altered locally as directed by the GRO.

Note that in this case the registers were altered ("corrected" hardly seems to fit in this case) from girl to boy, but the name - no longer appropriate - was left unchanged.

 

[peter]

Catherine Carle who registered the birth was not a relative as far as I know, only a neighbour from the other side of the street.

She was present at the birth, so may have acted as midwife.

On the GRO website the birth is still clearly registered as William Heseltine, a boy. If the GRO register was corrected or annotated, it is not in the digital image. Could there be another GRO record of amendments that is not included in the image?

Not unless the amendment was made after the registers were scanned in the 2000s, and as she would have been long dead it seems extremely unlikely.

In the 1891 census "William E." could well be a similar mishearing of "Willhemena" by the enumerator.

By 1891 most householders would have completed the schedules themselves - even in 1841 about half of householders filled in the forms. Did the parents sign the register or make their mark when they married?

 

[Pauline]

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.

 

[JFB]

By 1891 most householders would have completed the schedules themselves - even in 1841 about half of householders filled in the forms. Did the parents sign the register or make their mark when they married?

The parents married at Auckland register office in 1865. When I applied for a copy of the marriage certificate in 2000 I was sent a handwritten transcript. They said they could not provide an image of the original register. The transcript does however seem to indicate that both parents signed, because it shows one of the witnesses signed with a mark.
Ena was not known to me and is not a direct ancestor, but I am still very much of the opinion that with the rarity of the name Willhemena locally, it could still have been misheard/misunderstood especially with the local quick-fire accent. I am surprised by the gender ambiguity theories, but I have no evidence one way or the other. There are several local churches where the baptism could have taken place, and a register entry with a date might clarify, but annoyingly the local Durham County Record Office has been firmly closed to all enquiries and visits since Covid. (I no longer live locally).

 

[peter]

Durham Records Online doesn't have the baptism unfortunately.