In a message dated 30/07/2007 22:17:13 GMT Daylight Time, [email protected] writes: As the marriage is from an extraction it is likely to be correct Sorry, Nivard, but I have to disagree. I would have said "as the marriage is from an extraction is can be no more than a transcript, subject to the human error of the transcriber, and is therefore possibly incorrect". Add to this the terrible reputation for inaccuracy of the IGI and I would probably have gone further and said "any IGI information must be regarded as dubious until such time as it has been checked against the original record or a good facsimile of it". The original questioner didn't mention the parish (!) but from my 1992 microfiche edition of the IGI I see that it was Newcastle St Andrew. It appears in the index to St Andrew's marriages compiled by the late Alan Angus for the NDFHS, and available from them (see ndfhs.org.uk) as microfiche or CD. It will also appear on the Original Indexes fiche/CD, now available via the NFDHS's Ancestral Indexes service. It was included in Herbert Maxwell Wood's transcript of St Andrew's parish registers, made for the DNPRS and now in Newcastle Central Library (temporary premises in Newcastle Civic Centre) and that is also available on microfiche from Northfiche. My own database, mainly, in this case, taken from Alan Angus' material, simply lists the parties, suggesting that the wedding was after the calling of Banns, as was usual, and not by Licence. However, you could always check on the existence of a Marriage Bond, just to be sure. If the wedding was after Banns then there is not likely to be much you can do to tell which of several possible Robert Westgarths it was, so you could do worse than to try to identify the various Westgarth families in the 1660s and 1670s, using the Hearth Tax Returns - a set of records that should task most people's ability at palaeography! Apart from that, if the family were in a position to leave Wills then they also could be a worthwhile source. One final point - if the dates of their children's baptisms do not "fit", then (a) be certain you have made due allowance for the Julian Calendar still being in use and (b) do try to look at a facsimile of the original (ie a microfilm, not a typed or hand-written transcript), as often an entry of baptism can itself be read reasonably easily but the dates have been pushed into the binding, through later re-binding of the book, and can be very difficult to make out. Add to that the sometimes rather haphazard order of entries and their distribution across several pages, and I can quite understand how dates can be doubtful. Sometimes a neatly typed transcript can give the misleading impression that all was easy to read and only a facsimile can bring home how much doubt there has to be about eg the dates. Geoff Nicholson