Genealogy Chat

We spent several years tracing my wife's grandmother's Rimmer family in Southport. The name is notoriously difficult to reseach as it is so widespread. It wasn't helped by the fact that g grandfather changed his age on each census. This meant that there were several births to choose for over a period of 18 - 24 months.

We knew gg grand parents names but only mothers christian name, not her surname. Again there were several marriages to choose from. We thought we had the correct one based on location and ages of the children on the census, but it wasn't to be.

Eventually I decided to look meticulously for birth certificates for all of the siblings - from the censuses there were eleven known to have survied. With the exception of one, all had common christian names so again there were several options to choose from - again we got nowhere. We eventually found the birth for the one girl who had a less common christian name and ordered her birth cert. That proved to be the breakthrough, as not only was it the correct one it gave us gg grandmother's surname.

Armed with this we were able to trace gg grandparents marriage. It turned out not the one we had thought it to be - so there are several trees out there on GR and Ancestry who took my original research at face value and now have an incorrect tree.....!

We were then able to order g grandfathers birth certificate without quoting the GRO Ref as we had both parents full names. When you order in this way, the GRO search one year either side of the year you quote. We knew it was sometime between 1846 and 1848 so we quoted 01/01/1847 as the year.

Certs ordered this way without the ref take a month to arrive but well worth the wait in the end. You also need to make sure you only quote information you are absolutely certain of (or give alternatives as I did e.g. Elizabeth or Betty) as the GRO only issue a cert if everything matches.

You can look at other factors. Age, place of birth, spouse, children, occupation etc.

Sometimes you simply can't tell which of a number of entries is correct.

Andy

When looking for a common name and so many come up how
would you ever whcich is the right record you could not get all certificates
Maegaret