Thank you very much for recent help about registrations of births etc! I would be most grateful if you would help me avoid a possible serious error in my non-fiction prose book, Village... & if you could throw expert light on one marriage certificate.
First query... From 1848 to 1875, Dr Robert Eminson, a doctor based in the Lincolnshire village of Scotter, was the Registrar who recorded deaths & births of inhabitants I’ve researched in my own village, 8 miles away. I had assumed that all villagers would have to travel to Scotter to register births etc. From notes on the National Archives website, I now wonder if – before a change in the law in the 1870s? – the Registrar himself in fact travelled from Scotter to other villages, & collected information?
If so, I wonder how the death of one child, George Blow (certified, from typhoid) was registered by Dr Eminson on the same day the child died in 1856? (The details appeared on a certificate I recently posted on Rootschat.) The child’s mother, Mary Ann Blow, was co-habiting with a farm labourer. She would have had to walk 8 miles, or perhaps hire a cart, to reach Scotter. It is not obvious to me how else she could inform Dr Eminson of the death. Is it likely that the Registrar was visiting, as the child’s doctor, when the boy died? (The boy was buried next day, at his mother’s home village, several miles away.)
Secondly, I would be most grateful for your thoughts on the attached marriage certificate for Mary Ann Blow and Thomas Burrill. This took place, in Jan 1860, in the Register Office at Gainsborough, Lincs. Would a Register Office wedding then be unusual? And I wonder if an expert eye can decipher the note in the bottom right hand corner, next to a witness’s name, John Andrew. (Mary Ann had a fellow-villager called John Andrew.) I am not sure if the note refers to this witness, or what it says...
I should perhaps add that Mary Ann Blow had been a teenage servant of Thomas Burrill, hired to look after his sick wife. She had an illegitimate child (George) in 1853 & successfully sued Thomas for financial support. But she returned to his home (in my village) where his sick wife died, bizarrely (as reported in the press) in 1854.
Mary Ann and Thomas appear to have gone on living together. On 15 April 1859 she had a second illegitimate child, who she registered (with Dr Eminson!) as Mary Ann Borrell (one of many variants of Thomas’ name). The child was christened on June 19, 1859. And in Jan 1860, she and Thomas finally married. I would be most grateful for your thoughts on their choice of Gainsborough Register Office – and on whether this office was likely to be in the workhouse, which definitely existed in Gainsborough at that date. Many thanks!
