Missing GRO Record

[josey]

Brill, as usual I have learned something today from rootschat!!

[Jon_ni]

Maybe the Greene registration is the first one, alphabetically it is!

Entries on the page are in chronological order by registration date (and time), whoever walked through the door 1st to register the birth/death was registered 1st, so was 50/50 which one was which.

[jonwarrn]

I was actually referring to the two search results on the GRO website, not what order the registrations appear in the registrar's book.
I guess as they have no surname in the new index, there was no order, so, yes, a 50/50 chance of getting the right one first!

[phil57]

As you have found, unnamed children are indexed on the GRO on-line index with both a blank surname and forename. Why they don't use the same indexing rule as other entries and show the surname as that of the the father/mother ....I've no idea.

That's something I didn't know. Thank you Antony.

Although I have two children whose records contradict that, one un-named male and one un-named female, both died within 24 hours of birth. Both have a single dash in the Name column in their birth entries in the register, and a " - Merriweather" or " - Merryweather" in the Name and Surname column in their death entries.

They are in the online index as:

Births: "MERRIWEATHER, - " (1883/Q1/West Ham/4a/75) and "MERRYWEATHER, - " (1884/Q3/West Ham/4a/96)

and deaths: "MERRIWEATHER, - " (1883/Q1/West Ham/4a/32) and "MERRYWEATHER, - " (1884/Q3/West Ham/4a/54)

But your information has prompted me to search again for another rumoured child that I have so far been unable to find any trace of.

[AntonyMMM]

Not a consistent approach then !

I did once ask GRO if they could supply a copy of the rules/guidance that the transcribers were given to work from when the on-line indexes were being created. I was told that because the transcription was managed through the 3rd party company working on the digitisation project, they didn't have them....

I suspect they probably do, somewhere, but without seeing them, and knowing how closely they were followed, we have to make deductions from the entries we find.

[Tickettyboo]

Thank you to jonw65 and AntonyMMM I'd never have thought of trying a dash in the surname field.

I got nosey about this and checked 1861, by vol for death entries that use a dash. LOTS and that's just one year (see attached image, deaths only)
 So I'd think lots of folk have the same problem we have seen here which thanks to jonw65 was resolved. Not everyone reads Rootschat, can't search this database just using a year/quarter vol and page no. so anyone looking for deaths of babies born and died too soon is denied the opportunity of purchasing a digital image for £2.50 and maybe would have to pay a full £11 for a cert from a local registrar. That seems wrong to me.

I wonder what would happen if we reported one of these as a missing entry? Would it be added correctly with a surname,  hmm ...I may give that a whirl to find out :-)
Boo

[AntonyMMM]

I've submitted an FOI request to GRO for the transcription/indexing rules used for the digitisation project .....if/when they manage to find them I'll post the details.

[josey]

Well done. A request from you should carry some weight.

[jonwarrn]

And well done, Boo. That's a lot of dashes!