Family Historian User Group

I can't remember if this has been raised before, so here goes. Anyone got any suggestions why only one of a pair of twins (at least that is what is generally believed by those of us doing the research!) born in 1877/8 should have birth details on the register, yet both her and her sister have their deaths registered. The interesting bit is that the one who survived the longest, albeit probably less handicapped than her sister, into her 20s, was the one whose birth certificate I just cannot trace.
I've got all the rest.
Anyone who might look at Shropshire Family History site will see the full details - lots of my family who probably haven't marked graves.

vliet[cool]

ID:1849

Difficult to believe(if they really were twins) that they wouldn't have been registered together unless one died before the birth was registered.

So apart from that, surely the only possibility is that one is mis-transcribed in (or just missing from) the index. Must be one of the few cases where 'view others on the page' is useful apart from marriages. 9 times out of 10 consecutive birth registrations in the same office will have the same page reference even if one of the names is wrong. You could even try adding and subtracting one from the page reference to see if you get any likely mis-transcriptions.

I can't imagine how they actually produced these quarterly indexes, but whatever the procedure it must have involved copying the names from the registers, sorting them by hand, and copying them again into the index. And that's 100 years before they're re-transcribed for us to search.

Have you tried the original registry office as well as the GRO. I have had good results writing to the local offices where the GRO cert seemed wrong.

So it might be worth writing to ask if they could check their registers for you.