I'm researching a branch of my family who lived in the Wem area during the 19th Century. I have successfully found records of baptisms, marriages and burials on the Findmypast website, including images of the Wem Parish Registers. However, on the same website some of the records are duplicated (i.e. exactly same name of individual and same burial date), but the duplicate states that the event occurred in Upton-Waters. The duplicate is only a transcribed index with the source being given as "England Deaths and Burials 1538-1991".
As far as I'm aware the only Upton-Waters in Shropshire is more commonly referred to as Waters Upton, which is a parish in its own right and some 12 miles to the east of Wem.
Is there another Upton Waters that lies within the parish of Wem? Or is this likely to be a transcription error of place name in the "England Deaths and Burials" Index?
The same issue can be found on the LDS FamilySearch website.
Thanks for any help
Phil
Hello Phil
For your information and that of other researchers I have just sent a message to the LDS Family Search which I have copied to Find my Past.
It would appear that some records in Film No: 1657590 and Batch No: I03136-6 have been attributed to the wrong parish, that is Waters Upton (incorrectly written as Upton-Waters) instead of Wem.
In some cases the LDS Family Search records appear just once in the wrong parish and sometimes twice, once in the correct parish and once in the wrong parish.
There probably isn't going to be a quick fix to this problem.
Mike
Hi Mike,
Thanks for looking into this confusion.
Again it underlines the dangers of just looking at transcribed indexes and the real value to be gained at delving into the original records, in this case the Parish Registers.
Regards
Phil
Hi Phil.
The family you're referring to doesn't happen to be HAYCOCKS does it by any chance? I've found the exact same thing which is what led me to this post.
HI Mandy,
No sorry. I was researching the Maddocks / Maddox family.
Phil
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Hello Phil
Like you I am not aware of anywhere in the Wem area called Upton-Waters.
This problem seems to have started with the LDS Family Search where their catalogue is showing Waters Upton and Upton-Waters interchangeably. At some stage in the past a set of records have been attributed to the wrong parish and once established the error has been continued. Whether there is any (reasonably easy) way to sort out which entries are in error I shall have to think about.
There has been another problem with Wem, Shropshire records in the past but I don't know whether it still exists today. In the early days of family history when computers had very small memory and storage a system was devised to allocate a three letter code to each county to save space. These became known as the Chapman County Codes after Dr Colin Chapman who created them. Our local problem arose from the fact that the county code for Co. Westmeath, Ireland was WEM and this resulted in some records being allocated to the wrong place when they were being processed by the LDS.
Mike