The Hampshire Family Historian | Volume 49 No.4 | March 2023

Member’s article

A query that came into the Research Centre was asking about a marriage in Farleigh Wallop and trying to find proof of Marriage Confusion a family story that the bride was in service in the parish at that time. The couple involved were Joseph HEWLETT and Emily GIRDLER . To try and find out any further details I used the indexes in Findmypast and found the entry for Joseph in the April quarter 1892 in Basingstoke district, volume 2c, page 384, but when I checked on who he married the name Charlotte Elizabeth BODDY appeared when it should have been GIRDLER . I then searched for Emily GIRDLER and found her in the same place, quarter and volume but on page 389 marrying Francis MUTFORD . Obviously, something was wrong so when I looked at the image of the actual page it appeared that some names had been missed when the GRO page was originally typed up justice and punishment that was in use at that time. In trying to find more details about Thomas Murphy all that I could find were two entries with that name in the 1871 census, neither of which may have been the boy in question. In piece 1212, folio 101, page 9 there was a Thomas Murphy recorded as a mariner born circa 1852 in Southampton and who was an

inmate in the Hampshire County Prison. The other Thomas was in piece 1158, folio 92, page 7 where he was a soldier stationed at Fort Grange in Rowner, Gopsport. He was born circa 1853 supposedly in Ireland. If neither of these two were the boy mentioned in 1865 then that boy could have been a member of a “roaming” family who had moved on. Roy Montgomery (Member #3759)

and had been later written in by hand. It then became fairly obvious that the number for the page for Emily was a badly written 384 that had been interpreted as 389. The hand written page number for Joseph had been correctly interpreted as had the page numbers for the others grooms of Charlotte. I have raised a correction with Findmypast. Interestingly, Francis MUTFORD also appears as Francis MULFORD in the original typed version with the same details, another handwriting problem? Looking at Ancestry they did better because in their indexing they did have the correct page number for Emily and when checking the entry for Francis MUTFORD they did not record

Emily as being his marriage partner. Roy Montgomery (Member #3759)

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