Hi Tim,
I agree with David's comment with the additional proviso that births may
be registered well after the six week period allowed. To avoid a fine
the parents simply lie about the date of birth to the registrar, easy
enough to do before births routinely took place in hospital. If the baby
was not present when the birth was registered you might be able to get
away with registering up to a year after the baby was born.
At the other end of life, the person who actually knows the birth date
of the deceased may not be in a position to tell anyone - being dead!
I don't know when the practice of showing the birth certificate when
registering a death began, but even that is not guaranteed to produce a
precise date, for the reasons given above.
Generally, for recent deaths I would accept the birth date coded into
the GRO index, noting this as my source. Exceptions would be where I
have independent evidence for a different birth date, i.e. a baptismal
record which states the date of birth or an actual birth certificate
[although, admittedly neither of these is necessarily more accurate than
the date given in the Deaths index].
I think the moral of all this is: When recording data, do what seems to
be the most sensible thing at the time, always document your source(s),
and be prepared to make changes if further, more compelling evidence
comes to light.
With best wishes
Chris
_________________________________________________________
Tim Cattley <felis(a)mypostoffice.co.uk> writes
Chris/David/Anthony/Liz,
I would like your thoughts/advice on the following please because you
have probably already come across the same thing and come to some
conclusion :-
You will already know that certain batches of death records do not show
the age of the deceased but give their full d.o.b. instead, which is a
lot more helpful.
However, one would expect that where a specific date of birth is given
on the death record, that it would match up with the corresponding
birth record for that person, however, it looks to me as if around 25%
of the male Catley's shown do not have a corresponding birth record at
all!
This becomes very obvious when looking at the 1970's death PRO lists
which encompass individuals born around the 1890 to 1920.
When I first came across this anomaly, thought that maybe it was
because the person was born abroad but there seem to be just too many
instances for this to be a realistic explanation.
Logic tells me to act on the death information re birth and add the
individual to my birth list with an annotation as to how d.o.b was
obtained (ie not from GRO birth source) so as not to confuse the
situation.
What should I do?
--
Chris Newall EMail : chris(a)rebus.demon.co.uk
Ealing, London, W5 Website:
http://www.rebus.demon.co.uk/