Odd marriage certificate

[majm]

Mid 19th Century .... John and James emigrate to Australia due to their desire to suffer gold fever.  Both these brothers can read and write.  When they marry their brides, Johns surname is recorded as BROWN and James is recorded as BOWN.

WHY ....  When I look at the two images Johns mc reads BROWN and his witness is James and James signature clearly reads BROWN.   When I look at James mc James signs BROWN and John is his witness.   

The brothers live side by side in rural NSW Their children grow up and marry.  When John dies his dc reads BOWN and yep you guessed it James dc reads BROWN.

It is all in 'the eye of the beholder' and that is the magic of family history study. 
It is how each of us decide to interpret the document we are examining... 

Surely we are discussing a marriage in 1842 so we should be looking for a GRO issued cert to support the PR as this marriage took place in Somerset

PS There are many examples where in the 1840s there were plenty of 'poor spellers' The letters from Whitehall to NSW Governors are prime examples ... BUT poor spelling does not stop a person from marrying another person

Cheers JM 

[dee-jay]

Are you sure about this?

Never been more sure!  In order to separate 'my' HISCOCK ancestors from parish interlopers HITCHCOCK it was necessary to buy microfiche copies of all the PRs and the surviiving BTs and, in addition, all the post-1837 birth certificates pertaining to my gt-grandfather's siblings to separate them from another family in the same parish with similarly named parents.  To add to the difficulties, the 1841 Census returns have not survived for the parish, and only a fortnight ago I corrected yet another huge website with children attributed to the wrong parents.  Sadly, there are many more hanging on the 'web' in perpetuity with broken links .....

As for GRO generated certificates, I have a perfect example of one of theirs which fails to record the original names and an address to which  corrections were made prior to submission by the local Superintendent Registrar!  To my certain knowledge there are now three variations of the record for one marriage ceremony:  the original register entry;  the corrected entry submitted to GRO; and the supposed copy 'cobbled together' for me by the GRO  .....

[janan]

Are you sure about this? I always believed that spelling was not as important then as it is today. I also imagine that on many formal documents, they were simply filled in without any checks. Even if the bride/groom were literate, would they have asked to see, or been offered, the official document to check that spellings were correct? I doubt it ....

Of course it still happens today - names are misspelled.

I've come to believe exactly the opposite, that my literate ancestors knew exactly how to spell their name and that the misspellings and spelling variations came from the clergyman or the parish clerk. The fact that the family did not get to see the record is the reason that they couldn't get the mistakes corrected.

My Norfolk Davey family always spelled their name that way but usually go down incorrectly  in parish registers as Davy, and you should see the ways that incomer clergymen didn't cope with the Norfolk pronunciation of Amos.  My grandfather's middle name was Rignold and he was forever fighting with officialdom to stop it being "corrected" to Reginald.  Believe your family not officialdom.

Robert

I'd best not believe my Allsopps  James born 1863 signed his name variously James Allsop and James Allsopp. I have lengthy examples of his writing (which incidently include the variation Alsop) so believe he was literate.

Jan

[Redroger]

I think we should remember that after its beginnings in the 18th century standardised spellings gradually became the norm; and I have some evidence that the standardisation of proper names and family names etc. was slower to follow. I believe too that the evolution of language and of spelling is a continuing process. This without errors where the clergyman recorded what he thought he heard in the registers.