confused name

Question

i have added someone into my tree and he is listed twice on free bdm as it is showing his mother's maiden as two different surnames how should i put this into his biography

Comments

Hi Stephanie, what does free bdm stand for please??

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sorry it means free birth death and marriages where you can search for people in england and wales which can be found here https://www.freebmd.org.uk

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That's neat, thanks for sharing.

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Stephanie can you give the name/link to the profile?

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Freebmd is a very useful index Dorothy, but is not necessarily complete.

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in my tree he is knight-10012

Answer 1

If freebmd is showing two different names for the mother then you should consider the following options:

• Two different people. Perhaps cousins with the same name born in the same place and year.
• Transcription error on freebmd. Take a look at the actual image.

You can also check the information now by looking at the GRO's own index where they now show mother's maiden name. They only cover births up to 1916 though. 

Comments

i have checked now with familysearch and added this to his biography on there it shows his mother as tippett or knight

Answer 2

Stephanie, the way you have written the parent information on this profile looks adequate for now since you have no other information yet (however, I would add what source brought you to the conclusion).  Until you have more proof of parentage, I would hold off on adding parents for Vernon--which it sounds like you are already doing :-)

Answer 3

Image is here

https://www.freebmd.org.uk/cgi/information.pl?r=220113962:1774&d=bmd_1501508033&scan=1

and what is weird is there's another one on the same page - SMYTH OR KNOTT.

I can only think maybe some registrars were doing the certs in a non-standard way and the indexers decided to treat them as ambiguous.

One possibility is that the father box is empty and the mother box has 2 names, but there's nothing to show whether she was ever married, or whether she had two names for some other reason.

Note there's no "surname of child" box.  The name in the first column is surname of father, if given, otherwise mother.

Comments

marriage for his parents comes under knight and tippett so really weird so i am presuming that her maiden name was tippett for now

http://www.freebmd.org.uk/cgi/information.pl?cite=g6uFF9YFBEs%2FHQhtLYzh3A&scan=1

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That's in 1967, which is probably going to be the explanation - Vernon's mother was calling herself Knight in anticipation.

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so that explains it as to why 2 surnames