Hi All,

I do a One-name study, and after a few years of not progressing well I decided a different approach was necessary.

First, I wrote out, by hand, all the births of my study name in chronological order, taken from FreeBMD, from 1837 to 1992.

Then I went through all the deaths from the GRO, 'killing off' names where I could. I chose the GRO to do this as they have age at death from the beginning, making it easy to identify each person. I should say that at this point I'm only killing off the males.

I have just under 900 names, say half of them are males. I discovered 43 deaths for which I have no births. I accept there will be some issues with names being different over the years, ages being inaccurate sometimes, and other possible reasons, but I've matched where I can, marked some as dubious, and am still left with 43 that I definitely can't put anywhere yet. I feel this is quite a high percentage of missing records.

I next looked at Family Search births, and the very first 6 records that came up don't appear on either FreeBMD or the GRO. They do all, though, have a Volume and page reference. I haven't looked at their deaths yet.

I'm really surprised at the level of inconsistency - I thought these records all came from the same source. I would expect some errors, but not omissions to the degree I saw.

The other thing that caught my eye was the number of records on the GRO that state age at death in years, but should be months. I don't remember exactly but I think around 25 of my males who died under a year old actually had their ages in years. I do plan to send corrections.

I have a lot more work to do on this, I just felt I had to mention it. Does anyone know if these records are all sourced from the same place? It seems no wonder that we struggle finding our ancestors sometimes.

MoK