Missing GRO Death - 1945

[RW1]

I have ordered this, but mistakenly ordered the PDF (£7) instead of the Digital Image (£2.50)!

More haste....etc!

I have an estimated date of delivery of 22 January 2024 and will post here again once received.

Complete nightmare this.....

Hopefully some orphanage records will come in the post today relating to another member of this Greene-Butler family.

[MollyC]

I'm glad you have made another query.  Some time ago I had accumulated long lists of FreeBMD entries.  About 6 months ago I started checking them against the GRO index, but only those where I expected to find additional information.  e.g. age at death, mmn, initials expanded to forenames.  I have submitted 48 queries.

They have amended 32 of these.  Some of the others may well be incorrect spellings, either as recorded or copied to the GRO.  I found two errors in Registration Disticts.  They have admitted that Thoreditch was probably Shoreditch, but insist there is a place named Doncester, despite it not being in their dropdown list.

In one case "Online Index entry updated" was followed by "Indexed data is correct".  (It has been corrected.)

In another case they had a mmn as "E...holme".
I supplied the missing letters sk and a ref. to another birth from the same couple, which they accepted!

I suppose I should check all the rest.

[RW1]

Good work, MollyC.

I have reported 18. 13 have been amended; 4 have not; and of course the last we wait with bated breath for an answer.

[Raybistre]

I have submitted 53 reports, 9 rejected for various reasons. 2 were repeats, 1 of which was supposed to have been corrected but was not, another was corrected on the second report but not on the first. Several of the rejections were for missing entries.
I will persevere.
 Ray

[Jon_ni]

2 replies from GRONI recently surprised me as the quarterly copies sent pre-partition to Dublin were quite clear (GRONI index the original Local Register ledgers as that is all they hold prior to 1922). They have accepted many and occasionally a rejection has made me purchuse their image and indeed see a different spelling or date due to clerical copy errors that slipped through.

Amended Fields: Deceased Surname : Hewitt
Additional Information
Emma Hewitt died 18 March 1911, aged 13 days. Her twin brother Stewart is the next entry D/1911/51/1007/43/485. Their births U/1911/51/1007/62/464 & 463 were registered as Hewitt the same day as their deaths by their father.
"We have checked the original registration and can confirm that the information displayed on the website is correct. Therefore, we are not in in a position to make the proposed change(s)"

I couldn't find her death entry in their index, 1st 3 characters of surname is a required minimum, but to index it differently to her twin brother? The registrar clerks at the time didn't do that.
https://civilrecords.irishgenealogy.ie/churchrecords/images/deaths_returns/deaths_1911/05398/4507495.pdf

another one was a marriage 27 Dec 1893 that they say is indexed correctly as 27 Dec 1894 even though the previous marriage is 25 Dec 1893 and the next one 2 Feb 1894 per their own index. The Decemeber ones appear on the quarterly copy signed and dated 31 Jan 1894. So Dublin had a copy of the marriage before it happened! last entry on the copy https://civilrecords.irishgenealogy.ie/churchrecords/images/marriage_returns/marriages_1893/10614/5866896.pdf

[Andrew Tarr]

Bearing in mind that the GRO probably works on the same basis as others with customer service teams (ie as long as 80% / insert your own % here) of customer contact results in no further contact) that is the quality of service we have to accept.

Expect - yes ; Accept - no 

[RW1]

My THIRD and last attempt to report this error (narrative in free text field repeated below):
"This is William Charles BUTLER - the surname is missing and the second forename has been used as the surname instead. I reported this as a missing entry twice - it obviously does not come up on a GRO search for BUTLER. Twice you said you have investigated and no amendment was necessary. It would be nice to understand what form your investigation took and why you stated twice that no amendment was necessary, when clearly this was incorrect."

Response from GRO:
"Investigated – Online Index entry updated" - there was no further GRO comment.

Clearly this is not updated as it still fails to show under BUTLER.

Death Certificate confirms:
When and Where Died. "Twenty seventh January 1945 22 Oaks Lane UD"
Name and Surname. "William Charles otherwise Charles William Butler"

Presumably, GRO has decided he was known as "Mr W Charles" or "Mr C W Butler" and has decided to index only under the former!   

Thanks for the help in finding this - as I say, he's not my man! 

[AntonyMMM]

Death Certificate confirms:
When and Where Died. "Twenty seventh January 1945 22 Oaks Lane UD"
Name and Surname. "William Charles otherwise Charles William Butler"

Presumably, GRO has decided he was known as "Mr W Charles" or "Mr C W Butler" and has decided to index only under the former!   

Not great by GRO but your interpretation is correct I think. .... GRO will only index by what the entry says, not what it should say. 

The entry was incorrectly worded by the registrar - it should have said "William Charles Butler otherwise Charles William Butler". 

I believe (although haven't yet confirmed) that  the on-line index rules used for creating entries that have multiple names only record the first one recorded, unlike the older indexes which created a separate index entry for each name shown when "otherwise" or "formerly" was used.

At that time the convention to show the surname in capital letters hadn't been introduced so as far as they are concerned his full name, and the one that would be indexed, was William Charles ( with Charles as a surname).

When the older written index was compiled they appear to have used a little more common sense - but that would have been done by GRO staff, not by outsourced companies (possibly overseas) who have been given a set of strict rules to work from.

[RW1]

Thanks, Antony MMM - great to have your explanation.

I seem to remember you had an FOI with GRO on their conventions, etc? Did you hear anything?