Hi All, I have found a marriage licence bond/allegation on Findmypast for William THOMPSTONE and Mary WHITTAKER(S) (WHITTEKERS) dated 26 Mar 1798. The transcript states that he is 21 and she is 19. Since I believe him to be about 28 I looked for the ages on the original. However, I can find no reference to ages or dates of birth there. I expected to find "over 21" but can't. So I am puzzled as to where these ages have come from. The age of 19 for Mary is correct. Am I not reading the document clearly? Or where have the ages on the transcript come from? I still want to be sure I have the right William and the age casts a degree of doubt on that. Any help greatly appreciated. Christine

<<snipped>> I have found a marriage licence bond/allegation on Findmypast for William THOMPSTONE and Mary WHITTAKER(S) (WHITTEKERS) dated 26 Mar 1798. The transcript states that he is 21 and she is 19. Since I believe him to be about 28 I looked for the ages on the original. However, I can find no reference to ages or dates of birth there. <<snipped>> No, you're not going daft. The ages are in the index, and there are no ages on the page image. The FMP index links to an image of the _Bond_. Ages are written on Allegations (effectively, they are the application forms). At this era both bond and allegation _should_ be created and saved. The fact that your index looks like the index to an allegation makes me believe that somewhere in the world, that allegation exists and contains the ages. (Where William's age may well read "21 and upwards".) But what has happened to it, I really don't know. Since I have a subs, I can browse to previous and next images. The bond and allegation are usually adjacent because that's the way the stuff ended up filed and so it was microfilmed like that. However, browsing in both directions, there is no allegation for this couple (with or without ages) within a half dozen or so images. But it gets weirder. I went back something like 6 images and every single one of them (except yours!) is an allegation - not a single bond. But the original bonds were NOT lost - they are there on the microfilm as I can see the edge of the back of a bond on the left of the frame of each allegation - I can see enough of the (reversed) wording to recognise it as a bond. Because there is only a single entry in the FamilySearch index as well, I think somehow FS fouled up when they indexed this microfilm - probably only indexing the allegations, when they should have indexed both bond and allegation. And in your case, there seems to have been a double foul-up because while they indexed the allegation, they pointed it to the bond. If all the above is close to the truth, there's possibly no point raising a query with FMP to see if they can locate the missing allegation. The most sensible thing (which may or may not be practical) is to get someone to look at the microfilm at Chester Record Office to see if the allegation is there. Only then would it be sensible to go to FMP to see what they have compared to what's on the film. Adrian B PS - sorry if this is complicated - but that's reality here, I fear!