General Chat

Another one - you can't find the reference you want in the GRO indexes and are advised to contact the local register office, which turns out to be one of the London ones which refuses to issue certs for genealogical purposes. Your mum gives you a box of family papers which contains half-a-dozen certs you've already shelled out to the GRO for, plus a letter from a distant relative detailing all the research you've done yourself, but without any of the missing parts of the puzzle you still need. nell

Murphy's Law says your ancestors die. Sod's Law says it is in February 1851, or at sea. And the reverse: to have the birth in Sept 1837 AND the marriage! Brenda

Got all excited in the London Met Archives once, I was fed up with not finding what I wanted when I found they had a microfilm of the register of the Stoke Newington school my dad and his brothers went to! Yippee...except that the relevant years when they would have started and left were the only ones not there! nell

Oh yes Helen!! I have 7 generations of Josephs marrying Marys - and not one Jesus between them!!! maggie

Simon I did a similar thread to this one, and one of my points was that you google a relative's unusual name and get all excited when you find a hit...only to discover it leads to your own request for info you put on a website earlier! Oh, and that [in my husband's case] you find a great grandmother called Caroline Sarah Carter nee Robins, whose mother was Caroline Sarah Robins nee Dennison, whose mother was Caroline Sarah Dennison nee Higho...

Simon, You must be looking for the same people as I am!! Jacky :-)

Searching through an early census and getting to the area where you know some of the ancestors were christened and there is a message 'This piece has not been filmed.' Heather

It's a right b*mmer if your names Murphy!!!! maggie

You send for a marriage cert looking for the fathers name - and there is no fathers name entered.

I've come to realise that Murphy's Law (also known as Sod's Law) applies in Genealogy, just as much as it does to dropping buttered toast. Some examples I've come across : When searching for an event on 1837online, the name you're looking for will always be the one that crosses over two pages. Then, the correct entry will always be on the second page you pay to view, not the first one. In registers and BMD indexes, the entry you're looking for will be on a barely legible page, despite the pages on either side being perfectly readable. If you're searching for an event between, say, 1855 and 1871, if you start looking at 1871 and work backwards - the event will have happened in 1855; if you work forwards from 1855 the event will have occurred closer to 1871. Eventually you're bound to be related to a William Smith, or David Jones - or something equally impossible. As soon as you buy, say, the 1851 census, you'll suddenly come across a lot of ancestors born in 1852. What other examples of Murphy's Genealogy Laws can you think of ? Simon

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