Location of relatives

Question

Hi I have been updating my tree and find some other members have the same relatives in theirs, so I do connect.

However I notice a number of errors re location, so I am asking for advice. Most of my family were born and died in Tenterden Kent, UK with my direct line from around 1870 moving to Folkestone Kent UK. About 20 to 30 miles apart, I myself am from Folkestone Kent.

However the birth records show the registration district as an old Parish council called Elham. A very tiny place with about a dozen houses, a church and a pub; it is also the diocese that incorporates Canterbury Kent.

So Elham is the correct district but definitely not the birth or death location.

I feel the actual location should be noted rather than the registration district, that is nowhere near actual location.

Am I right? after all who has heard of Elham.

I only discovered I too am down as Elham about 20 years ago and not Folkestone.

Comments

Just to be pedantic, they are registered in the Registration District of Elham, not the parish of Elham. The parish may indeed be tiny but the registration district was quite large, including all of Folkestone for example. You can see its details here: https://www.ukbmd.org.uk/reg/districts/elham.html

You might well think naming a registration district after one of its smallest constituents is rather foolish and I wouldn't disagree. If you know a more exact location then definitely use it in the profile. You can always source it as 'personal memory' if you're concerned about unsourced information.

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The birth registration place is where the registration office is/was located not the place where the birth took place.

Personal memory of an ancestor's birth before the profile manager's birth??? not the best idea.

If you look at baptism records for the same person on the parish records section of the same website, you can usually find the residence of the father on the baptism record.

The father's residence is usually but not 100% guaranteed to be where the child was born.

https://www.ukbmd.org

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Yes I should have said personal or family knowledge rather than memory. Family traditions are obviously inferior to documentary sources but I don't see any problem with using them to enhance profile data.

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thanks. I should have said Elham is the reg district.

I will use actual place, as long as I know it to be correct. else I will use reg district.

Answer 1

I always put the actual location of birth rather than the registration district as a registration district can contain a large number of places. For example, the Elham registration district contained the places in this list Elham Registration District (ukbmd.org.uk) 

Answer 2

According to the England Project's location standards (https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:England_Project_Profile_Standards#Locations), "Where the most precise location found for an event is a Registration District (for post-1837 events), the Registration District may be included in the location in the form [X Registration District, County, England]. This should be regarded as a temporary description until the precise place is known."

So, as you say, using the actual location is better than using the registration district, but if the actual location isn't (yet) known then using the registration district is better than nothing.

Comments

It seems to me that the ideal approach would be to include all of the recorded place names in the profile text. For example, if full details are known (and using fake place names here because this purely hypothetical), the profile might say the person was born at Puddlewick, baptized at Puddlejump St Somebody, and registered in the Great Puddle registration district. With this detail, if someone (such as an American like me) shows up expecting to find the person in Great Puddle (because that's the only information they have), they will have a decent chance of understanding why the location name(s) might be different.

Answer 3

Hi Richard,

I think it depends what you want the information to tell you. Most Registration Districts appear to include several towns which are currently much larger than the place the RD name is based on. It is not quite so severe an example, but Trowbridge in Wiltshire has been within the RD of Melksham, which is smaller. Wiltshire is of course the County of Wilton (Wiltonscire), which is a little teeny suburb of the town of New Sarum, otherwise now known as Salisbury. I myself am sitting at a desk in Ystumaner, but you will not find that on your UK road atlas. To find me physically you need 'Tywyn', (in Meirionydd, not Gwynedd, although it is in Gwynedd physically); but to find Church records about me, such as a will proved here, you need the Deanery name, or RD name. It is always a dilemma knowing which 'address' to use, and a most accurate one including all the relevant area names is often not available in drop-down boxes of standardised locations. Many places 'moved' several times too, from one county to another. Even from one town to another (202 Barry Road, used to be in Cadoxton; for a while it was considered to be in Barry Docks; now it is in Barry. The last is illogical, since it ought to be on the road TO Barry from somewhere else. In the Valleys, there are even terraces of houses where one house is in one town and county, and the one the other side of the party wall is in a different town/county, but the same Church court area. Part of the fun! In my records, I would include both Folkestone and Elham in the address.