Family Historian User Group

This is not a question, just a cautionary tale.
We all know that the GRO index is only a rough guide to the date an event took place, because the index is based on the date an event was registered. Births and deaths were often not registered and indexed until the quarter after the one in which they occurred.

I have always assumed that marriages, recorded at the time they occurred, would be indexed in the correct quarter. But I have just found a marriage indexed for the quarter before it took place!

John Ware and Louisa Hann were married in West Stour, Dorset, on 4 May 1851. There are two different images of the parish record of this marriage available on Ancestry.co.uk. Both clearly show the date as 4 May 1851. Ages of bride and groom are both recorded as 18. (The forms are different: one page is in the same format as the GRO records, the other an older-style parish record page.)

However the GRO marriage index has John Ware and Louisa Hann both recorded in Q1 1851 (Shaftesbury vol 8 p 183). My first thought was that the marriage date must have been 4 March, not 4 May. How else could it be in the GRO index for the first quarter of the year? However, in the census on 30 March 1851 John Ware, aged 18, was with his parents and siblings, recorded as unmarried. And Louisa Hann, then aged only 17, was a ‘visitor’ in their house, also unmarried.

(Incidentally to confuse things further the marriage banns, which were published in February 1851, have been transcribed and indexed on Ancestry as January 1852!! )

The other couple recorded on the same page in the parish register, James Blackmore and Caroline Hayter, were correctly indexed in Q1 because they were married on 13 January. So it looks as if the error crept in either when a copy was sent to GRO (someone copied May as March) or when the GRO created the index.

This is not the first time I have found discrepancies between parish and GRO records, but it is the first time I have found an event apparently recorded by GRO before it happened!

Weird - maybe we now know the real name of Doctor Who? John Ware?

If I understand the process, that entry should have been the only one submitted in that quarter by the church. I'm tempted to wonder if the clerk was so late submitting the previous quarter (with one entry again?) that it was May already and he entered John Ware's marriage as well so that got bundled up with the Q1 marriage and indexed accordingly. Without seeing the full GRO certificate, I guess we won't know... Well, either that or we borrow the Doctor's TARDIS.

Adrian
PS - it's almost as difficult trying to decide why a pre-1837 marriage register was being filled in as well as a post-1837 one, which was what first caught my eye!

There was a book, whose title I can't remember, published in the 90s I think, based on research that the author made at the GRO where he found a very high number of mistakes where certificates were incorrectly indexed, or not indexed at all. The figures ere quite alarming and made people realise that the indexes couldn't be trusted and ideally need to be remade again by going back to the original certificates. Recent indexes made from local register offices (such as by cheshirebmd.org.uk) are far more accurate as they are based on the original registrations.

That could be Michael Whitfield Foster's books "A Comedy of Errors" and "A Comedy of Errors Act 2" - not funny if you are relying on GRO indexes.

David