Thank you, Shirl, for that. :-)
I am familiar with the Dorset OPC pages. They're great aren't they and clearly the transcribers have given a lot of their time to making the data available, free, to one and all who have Dorset forebears. However, and I can't speak yet for the other parishes, but Porteshan's vitals pages are incomplete as you may have discovered. The data was extracted from filmed BT's and not all years had been photographed leaving glaring gaps, plus there are individuals who appear in the OPR's who, for whatever reason, don't appear in the BT copy. I've found the selfsame thing happening in the BT's of other counties too. In spite of that, as long as one is aware of the holes, the transcriptions are a marvellous facility for the rest of us.
Also, valuable though burial data is, MI's provide a somewhat different category of information. They often provide family groups, and sometimes family members who never made it to any of the local records. For instance, gravestones sometimes commemorate relations who died and were buried elsewhere. They can often give a clue as to which of the two John's who married Elizabeths was the couple who belong to you particularly before parents started getting a mention on folks' marriage lines. They can draw your attention to the perhaps previously unknown fact that forebear Joseph actually married two Marys and there was you thinking all the time that it was the same Mary that bore the whole string of kids. Forebears can be very misleading in their doings! All adds to the fun of the chase of course :-)
Some relatives got themselves planted in a different county or parish. For very many years we couldn't understand what had happened to one of ours; he died in Edinburgh in Scotland after spending all his adult life and raising all his kids there. His wife died and was buried there, but no sign of John. How could we ever have foreseen his arranging his burial in St Mary's churchyard in Hayes, Kent - in the 1830s what's more - so as to be buried alongside his 2 brothers neither of whom died in Hayes. A long journey by horse and carriage that! That's well over 600 miles. Fortunately it was mid-winter but one can only hope he was well embalmed! Wee things like that. An MI can often answer questions where other sources fail.
Thanks again for your input :-)
Fionnghal
