Genealogy Chat

I sent for the death certs of 3 people who died on the same day in 1866.
The person who registered the deaths was 'Samuel'. (I expected to see 'James'.) I can see that this could be an error in transcription.

I want to know about the transcribing process.

Hi Phillippa

I'll watch this in case I'm wrong, but I don't think there is any transcription involved here. The certificates you receive are actual copies of the original entry. So if the certificates say that Samuel registered the deaths, then Samuel did indeed do so.

3 in one day sounds tragic, what happened?

Duncan

Philippa

If your certs came from the GRO then they will indeed be transcriptions. The original entries are held by the local register offices, who sent copies (i.e. transcriptions) of each event to the GRO. So even though the transcription was done soon after the event (i.e. at the end of each quarter), there was still the possibility of transcription errors getting into the GRO records.

And if you got your certs from the local register office rather than the GRO, then they are probably modern-day transcriptions from the original register - most offices will not supply a photocopy of the original entry unless you specifically request this, and even then they may refuse on the grounds that the original registers are too large and/or too fragile to photocopy.

So in this case your best bet is to ring the local register office for the district where your deaths were registered, and ask them to check the informant details for you.

Cheers
Richard

Thank you