Thanks Mike. That's really good advice 
I am also hoping one day to be able to go and look at parish records but not sure when that day will be!
Hi, I'm glad my suggestions helped! Thanks to forums like these I'm on a steep learning curve with regard to 'good practice'. I'm hesitant to offer suggestions to people like you while I still need to make so many improvements to my own 'workflow'. I looked at your records primarily as an 'exercise' for myself.
I do all my 'research' through the internet. It still amazes me how many parish records are now available online, thanks to the tireless work of many volunteers. Forebears.io is the best resource I've found for this. If you're able to narrow down your search to a county or town, you'll often find image data (Baptisms records, Marriage Banns, Christenings, etc.) on forebears.io for the years you're interested in. One thing I like about forbears.io i that you can subscribe for a month when you're looking into something. Finding the digital images of the records you need often requires reading through 2-5 years of (digitised)records but it's worth the effort when you discover valuable clues. There's only been one case in the past few years where I needed to order a marriage certificate by post.
Over the past 5 years (on and off), I've gone through different phases of research:
- reviewing Ancestry 'hints' and accepting the ones that seemed plausible
- realising that a lot of Ancestry 'hints' weren't as accurate as I'd thought
- going back and systematically checking all the supporting and contradictory 'evidence' (at Ancestry and other sites too) for the key people and links
- finally realising that I had to take personal 'ownership' of my data (reliability, quality), independently of whatever 'hints' and suggestions I got from various websites
That's where I'm at now: critically questioning any new data I find or am 'offered', even if it seems to fit. I want to find
all the evidence available from different sources that support the 'offer' or 'find'. I also want to check that there is no evidence that may contradict - or offer alternative evidence for - the 'offer or 'find'.
I've had to remove some (older) sub-trees which - at the time -I was delighted to find. It was heart-breaking! So now I try to distinguish between 'certain', 'probable' and 'possible' links. This sounds fine in theory but I've not yet found a website/program that allows me to do this. A couple of people here have thought up 'work-arounds' to flag and filter people in this way. I'm still trying to figure out a way to do this that works for me. It boils down to the 'confidence level' you have in people and relationships. Ideally, websites and programs would allow for this distinction and allow you to copy people and relationships for which you have a low confidence level to a 'To Do' list.
I'm now trying out a couple of programs on a trial basis to see how they could help me make this distinction off-line. As far as I know, none of the major websites (Ancestry, etc.) allow this. Tumara Jones (
http://www.tamurajones.net/) made a good case in 2012 for not propagating 'dubious' data.
Hope you solve the mystery and find what you're look for!
Mike