Hi All
Thank you for your replies but they have not really covered the question I was asking. This was not a women's rights question, or a women's occupation question or about widows but rather one of the procedure used in recording spinsters' deaths.
The problem is you are asking for specific information but are not giving enough details to give specific information.
For instance we now know that the time period of the 1860s is relevant “(at least not in the 1860s)”.
This makes a huge difference as the way deaths were recorded in the 1860s was different from the way deaths were recorded in the 1880s.
The law in the 1860s required that-
“XXV. And be it enacted, That some Person present at the Death or in attendance during the last Illness of every Person dying in England after the said First Day of March, or in the case of the Death, Illness, Inability, or Default of all such Persons, the Occupier of the House or Tenement, or if the Occupier be the Person who shall have died, some Inmate of the House or Tenement in which such Death shall have happened, shall, within Eight Days next after the Day of such Death, give Information, upon being requested so to do, to the said Registrar, according to the best of his or her Knowledge and Belief, of the several Particulars hereby required to be known and registered touching the Death of such Person : Provided always, that in every Case in which an Inquest shall be held on any dead Body the Jury shall inquire of the particulars herein required to be registered concerning the Death, and the Coroner shall inform the Registrar of the Finding of the Jury, and the registrar shall make the Entry accordingly.”
The wording is very important as you can see the informant may not know the person whose death is being reported.
This is also the time when it was the registrar’s duty to visit the informant rather than the informant visit the registrar to report the death
It has been asserted to me by a few people that the informant did not have to provide the name and occupation of the deceased spinster's father. They found it unusual and have ascribed it to ulterior motives of trying to cover up who her real father was.
As you can see from the above quote the informant did not have to answer any of the questions asked he/she only had to “give Information, upon being requested so to do, to the said Registrar, according to the best of his or her Knowledge and Belief”
He/she may in reality know very little about the dead person beyond the fact that they died at such a time in such a location.
You must ask yourself would the people concerned in any such cover up think it worth the penalties involved for in reality no gain.
I don't want to go into the actual details of the case as it occurs in a published biography. Some people have decided she was the daughter of X because they have found a baptism that seems to fit but the father named in the baptism does not have the same name or occupation as the father stated on the death certificate.
To Anthony and Scouseboy; my remark about the relationship between the informant and the Registrar was a separate fact I discovered in the course of my research. Nowhere on the certificate are the words son in law. It's just another little twist in this vexing case. Would the informant lie to his father in law? Would they collude to give false information?
Here we cannot answer as we do not know if your research has accurately discovered any relationship between the registrar and informant, or whether they are simply two men with the same names. I don’t mean this as a slight on your research but we are being asked something about facts we do not know and cannot check.
Let me clarify my question. I think that the recording of a spinster's father and his occupation was a standard procedure in the recording of an Entry of Death of an unmarried woman asked of the informant who may or may not have known. But I don't know if I am correct in this thinking. Was this a question asked from the start of Civil Registration or was it made standard at a later date?
Thank you.
Venelow
Canada
The facts required by law were-
When Died, Name and Surname, Sex, Age, Rank or Profession, Cause of Death, Signature, Description, Residence of Informant, When registered.
There is no way of knowing what questions were actually asked (though we can assume the types of questions asked) and we can compare what information was supplied in the same time period.
However we could only gain a better understanding by checking records of other deaths by that particular registrar to guess what questions he may have asked as each would have their own peculiarities.
Cheers
Guy