Was able to look at Whitchurch parish records, only to find that the marriage certificate I have from the General Register Office has got the wrong first name on of my great great grandfather on. That is why after 4 years of looking I could not find him, also has one of the witness names was wrong as well..........still cannot get my head around it ..........I never thought that it would be wrong........so how many of the certificates we buy are corrected............now I must start all over again.............
Hello Debi
There are two basic types of certificate you can obtain from the General Register Office. The first is either a hand written or typed copy of the 'original' and the second is a photocopy of the 'original' reproduced on a modern blank form.
If you have the photocopy type then it will tell you exactly what is recorded at the General Register Office but if you have a hand written or typed copy then of course there is always the possibility of error even though they are supposed to be checked to eliminate errors.
As Peter points out the document at the General Register Office is itself only a copy of an original local document whether it is for a Birth, Marriage or Death registration and this is perhaps the most likely place for an error to have taken place. Anyone who has done any transcribing or indexing will know how difficult it can be to read some of the hand writing.
As a general rule it is much better to buy your certificates from the local Superintendent Registrar to avoid some of the above problems but this was not really possible with marriages until the introduction of computerised indexes like the Shropshire BMD project which now includes local references for over a hundred thousand Shropshire marriages and still growing.
Mike
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Debi,
What you get from the GRO is not a direct visual copy of an authentic original document but a subsequently manually-transcribed version of that original.
I expect that the details on the GRO certificate you have are probably all written by one person - i.e. it is all in the same handwriting, whereas the details on the Whitchurch original will be in the differing handwriting of the various participants.
It is likely that the parish official who abstracted the details to send them on to the GRO did so some time after the wedding date and did his honest best with the mixture of handwriting styles on the original.
Therefore, it is understandable if a name is mis-transcribed, particularly for a witness where it may possibly be difficult to decipher the signature.
I myself have experienced this with a number of certificates that I have obtained from the GRO and these inadvertent transcription errors (often in conjunction with provably-dishonest names, ages, marital status & parentage) have taught me to regard anything but the original document as qualified at best - even though the copy may have emanated from an "official" source.
Such are the frustrations of family history research......
Peter