deciphering marriage registration

Post by **AndrewP** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 8:36 pm

kathyc wrote:Apart from the IGI and census records, which aren't any help in this case, is there a way to search for children of particular parents? A surname check for births in the relevant years in their known 1881 location on SP yields WAY too many pages for my budget.

Hi Cathy,

It's a pity thay hadn't been 10 years or so earlier, as the IGI could have helped there. A parent search on the IGI should produce a list of children born to a couple, but the Scottish births from the records stop at the end of 1874 on the online IGI. The ScotlandsPeople index does not include parents' names (apart from mother's maiden surname on a small portion of the records), so they offer no shortcut to finding children to a couple.

The next best option is to find the family on a succession of censuses. That should give you the names, approximate birth years and birthplaces of most of a couple's children. The ones that will fail for are children who died young, having been born and died within the 10 years between two censuses. The children listed on the censuses should lead you to their birth certificates. If there is a noticeable gap between children and the children either side of this gap were born in the same area, that gives you a chance to narrow down the search by years and location(s).

All the best,

AndrewP

Post by **emanday** » Sat Mar 03, 2007 10:22 pm

After reading AndrewP's suggestion about infant deaths, I did a quick search for McLean children dying age up to 5 years in the Kelvin area. These are the results...

No Year Surname / Maiden Name Forename Mother's Surname Other Surnames Sex Age District City/County/MR GROS Data
1 1887 MCLEAN DONALD M 0 KELVIN GLASGOW CITY/LANARK 644/09 0910
2 1887 MCLEAN GEORGE M 4 KELVIN GLASGOW CITY/LANARK 644/09 0013
3 1885 MCLEAN ISABELLA F 0 KELVIN GLASGOW CITY/LANARK 644/09 0039
4 1885 MCLEAN KATE ANN F 2 KELVIN GLASGOW CITY/LANARK 644/09 0117
5 1888 MCLEAN LACHLAN NEIL M 0 KELVIN GLASGOW CITY/LANARK 644/09 0480
6 1887 MCLEAN MARGARET F 2 KELVIN GLASGOW CITY/LANARK 644/09 0928
7 1883 MCLEAN MARY F 3 KELVIN GLASGOW CITY/LANARK 644/09 0733
8 1887 MCLEAN MARY ANN CANNIN CANNING F 0 KELVIN GLASGOW CITY/LANARK 644/09 0890
9 1887 MCLEAN WILLIAM M 0 KELVIN GLASGOW CITY/LANARK 644/09 1084
10 1885 MCLEAN WILLIAM JOHN M 0 KELVIN GLASGOW CITY/LANARK 644/09 0991

May have nothing to do with your family, but do any of the names, middle names sound familiar as regularly used in your line?

kathyc · Post by **kathyc** » Mon Mar 05, 2007 9:27 pm

Mary, 7 out of 10 of them are family names, and three of those are possibles given the time frame. I've put them in my possibles file to follow up on later.

Great idea about searching deaths instead of births.

Russell, getting information from marriage certificates of siblings is great, isn't it? My first sibling-as-witness showed up on this same couple's marriage certificate, which got me started on putting the bits of her life together.

Andrew, it is a pity they don't fall in the IGI range. They've managed to handily avoid some of the useful sources. They were in America when the 1891 Scottish census took place and for the destroyed 1890 American one, so I've had to pick them back up in 1901 when she and the kids were back in Scotland.

Kathy

Post by **emanday** » Mon Mar 05, 2007 11:00 pm

I've discovered that the other information on these entries can be really valuable.

Many children were born at home, but not necessarily their OWN homes. One set of parents I'd never been able to find on censuses before turned out to be living at the address where their grandchild was born. (Went home to Mum for the birth or just happened to be there at the time?)

Many of my female marriage witnesses turned out to be sister to the bride. Searching for marriages between their first name and the bride's surname, and the surname they signed with has revealed sibling marriages, sometimes even siblings I never knew existed! An even wilder search is to use the ages of both the original bride and her sister witness to find out if there were other siblings. This is especially useful for the period after the IGI records cut off.

I'm learning new "tricks" every day, but have to admit I have also had costly misdirections. I have also ignored some search results because the place or date seemed not to match, only to later discover that "Wee Jimmy" WAS born in another parish or was actually a fair few years older than indicated in an MC or DC!

Big lesson I learned? - Keep an open mind!

Post by **AndrewP** » Tue Mar 06, 2007 5:20 am

emanday wrote:Many children were born at home, but not necessarily their OWN homes. One set of parents I'd never been able to find on censuses before turned out to be living at the address where their grandchild was born. (Went home to Mum for the birth or just happened to be there at the time?)

I have found that a lot of daughters, married or not, went "home" to their mother's house for the birth of the first child. This was quite regular in the days before births in a maternity hospital became the norm (generally from early 20th century onwards).

All the best,

AndrewP