Tuesday's tip - what does it look like, what does it sound like?

When you are searching in indexes, sometimes you don't find what you are looking for because the spelling isn't what you expected it to be. If you haven't already discovered this for yourself, go back and write out the first sentence 100 times before proceeding any further!

OK, having established this principle, how do you deal with it? There are several strategies, and the best one to employ depends on the source you are using. You have to think about how the information was recorded in the first place, and how it has been copied since then. For example, was the name written down as it sounded? This would happen when an illiterate farm labourer registered the birth of a child and the registrar wrote it down. An illiterate person would have no way of knowing whether the registrar had spelled the name correctly; registrars had some guidance on the standard spellings of forenames, but surnames can be much trickier. A registrar, or anyone writing down an unfamiliar name  without any way of checking the spelling, will do the best they can, but he result may look quite different from the more usual spelling of the name, and often begins with a different letter. Sometimes it helps to say a name out loud in the local accent. This worked for me when I had trouble with the surname Aveyard in Yorkshire, and the person I was looking for sometimes appeared with the surname Halfyard. If you don't know what a Yorkshire accent sounds like this will make no sense, but trust me, it works.

Then there is the question of copying. Details of births, marriages and deaths were copied by local registrars and clergy and sent to the General Register Office, where they were copied again by GRO clerks (twice - once on transcription slips and again on the index pages themselves, up to 1865). At all stages the names were hand-written in cursive script, so the writers sometimes mistook one letter for another because they looked similar. Letters that look similar when hand-written are not the same as those that are similar in block capitals, or printed. Pairs of handwritten capital letters that can be easily mistaken are F and T, L and S, M and W and more, depending on individual handwriting styles. Another danger area can be combinations of lower-case letters  i, m, n, u, w which can be indistinguishable when written quickly, and look like a zig-zag line. You can add a, e, o, v and r to this list with some handwriting styles, and a t where the cross is faint can look like l. Just think of the possibilities! Sometimes a name will be mis-copied as a more common one that looks similar; Hubert has never been a common name, but the similar-looking Herbert used to be very popular and is often worth a try if your Hubert is proving elusive. I have also found David appearing as Daniel - Daniel was  much the more common of the two in 19th century England (although the reverse was true in Wales).

Once typewriters and computers are involved, you need to look at the kinds of mistake you make with a keyboard, which are quite different from the ones you make with a pen. I once spent ages looking for the death entry of someone with the unusual surname Quarmby, in the Olden Days when we only had index books, no snazzy databases, fuzzy matches and the like. In the end I found it by accident, only because it happened to be at the top of the page - as QQUARMBY. This was a 1975 entry, and the GRO indexes had been prepared using computer technology since 1969. There seems to be no automated procedure to identify improbable letter combinations like this, which are clearly the result of keying errors; even in the most recent GRO indexes that you can see online (2006 births and deaths on FindMyPast) you will find a number of people called WILLLIAMS (sic).

Of course you then find an extra layer of errors when records are transcribed for websites. Indexers are often working from film or fiche versions of records, which may be hard to read. I don't want to worry you, but by the time you search for a birth, marriage or death online, the name might have been written or keyed up to five times, with five opportunities to get something wrong. But, bad as it sounds, only a small proportion of names are wrong in records and indexes; in my years of experience of researching my own family history and helping other people with theirs, I have fonnd that most people find most of what they are looking for, most of the time.


 

Who was Stanmore Groat?

Great Stanmore Old Church, Middlesex 

If you search for Stanmore Groat using the exact search option on Ancestry.com you will find 189 results. If you look closely you will see that all 189 results are in the recently released London, England Electoral Registers 1835-1965. So this magnificently named person was apparently eligible to vote London, but left no other trace of their existence. Very curious.

Sadly, Stanmore Groat never existed (except maybe in the pages of Dickens' novels, it sounds like the kind of name he would make up). Neither did a whole cast of characters including Abbey Twyford, Hendon West, Chelsea Little, Magna Greenford, Dale Slade, Field Ponderend, Chase Hope-Cottage, Common Shortwood  and many more. They are place names that have been mistaken for personal names, which appear surname-first in the registers, and have therefore been reversed for indexing. With a few transcription errors thrown in for good measure you get 'names' like those above; there are nearly 5000 'people' called Stanmore Great, but I like Stanmore Groat better.

Having had my fun with this game, which brightened up a dull Friday afternoon, I will now say that these records are actually very useful and informative. We are accustomed to modern electoral registers which are just lists of names in address order, with minimal extra information. Some older registers, on the other hand, may give details of property, when there was still a property qualification, and even indicate if a voter was a lodger. Some 20th century registers indicate voters who were in the armed services, or who were eligible for jury service.

You will also find women in the registers well before they were able to vote in Parliamentary elections; when the London County Council was established in 1889 all adults were able to vote in its elections, regardless of their gender or the value of the property they occupied. It is worth remembering that many men were not eligible to vote in Parliamentary elections until 1918, although, like the women they will appear in the electoral register if it is a combined one for both local and national elections.

The coverage is not as extensive as you might think, as you will see if you go to the 'Browse this collection' option. Not all London boroughs are covered, and the dropdown menu contains an odd mix of modern boroughs like Tower Hamlets, former boroughs like Willesden and three counties - London, Middlesex and Surrey. Some parts of present-day Greater London were once in Surrey, Kent or Essex as well as Middlesex, and there is little coverage for these areas, in many cases because the records are not held at the London Metropolitan Archives. However there are no registers for the old borough of Wembley, was joined with Willesden to form the modern borough of Brent, but only the Willesden registers are on the site. It is to be hoped that their registers will be added in due course.

John Reid has also looked at these electoral registers and makes some useful comments on his Anglo-Celtic Connections blog. I fully agree with his recommendation of the Gibson Guide Electoral registers since 1832 : and burgess rolls for an excellent introduction to electoral registers and how to make use of them.