Many thanks, Martin. It is possible that Army protocols required special arrangements, which the Registrar General for births, deaths and marriages would not have approved. Thank you, Harry. Yes, the three Gough sons all appear in FreeBMD. However, I originally received their details, and birth dates, from Gough family history sources. All three are genuine. FreeBMD, now a Rootsweb service, is usually very reliable, with effective corrective mechanisms in place. Best wishes. Peter Harry Tadd wrote: > Is it likely that someone who was heavily pregnant would have gone from > Bruton in Somerset to Guildford to get married a second time and then > return to Bruton to deliver? > I think you can ignore the second marriage. > Are the two children born in Surrey part of your Bruton family? Are the > rest of the family on FreeBMD. How trustworthy is FreeBMD? > Harry <snip>

Peter Ferreira wrote: > It is possible that Army protocols required special arrangements, > which the Registrar General for births, deaths and marriages would > not have approved. It's not the Registrar General who wouldn't have approved. It would have been the /Army/ who wouldn't have approved. It's perfectly possible both marriages ARE your couple. If Arthur was already in the Army when he married in Bruton, it may have been without his CO's permission. If that was the case, if he was killed, his widow wouldn't have received any financial considerations due to her because the army would not have recognised the marriage as legal even though it would have been. Therefore, Arthur would have needed his CO's permission which he probably sought when he knew Emily was expecting, hence the second marriage in Guildford RD. If the local registrar was a bit tardy in sending in his return, it's possible the marriage was recorded in the quarter following the one in which it took place. Thus the second marriage may have been earlier than it appears to be. I would suggest either joining the Rootsweb Surrey list and asking if anyone is going to the record office if they could check the second marriage details for you OR contacting the local registrar's office and asking if the fathers for the couple are those given on the Bruton marriage, obviously actually giving the names but acting innocent and not admitting you have the Bruton marriage cert. Sometimes they will tell you, sometimes they'll insist you buy the cert. The only other reason I can think of for a second marriage is that there was something wrong with the first one, eg one party was already married to someone else or someone made an objection. The second marriage was usually in the same parish but may have been in a neighbouring one. It wouldn't usually have been half way across the country as this seems to have been. > FreeBMD, now a Rootsweb service, is usually very reliable, with > effective corrective mechanisms in place. FreeBMD is NOT a Rootsweb service and never has been. It's totally independent. It's one third of FreeUK, the other parts being FreeCEN and FreeREG. Ancestry and Rootsweb /sponsor/ FreeBMD's site along with The Bunker but that is something completely different. In return for Ancestry's sponsorship, FreeBMD let them have a copy of their database on condition it remained free of charge but it was always slightly out of date compared to their own site: www.freebmd.org.uk What they have is a transcription of the GRO indices which are in themselves a transcription of the quarterly returns from the local register offices. The only corrections that can be made are to mistranscriptions made by FreeBMD transcribers, not mistranscriptions by the registrar's clerk or GRO clerks. However, additional information and details from certificates held can be added to entries using the Postem system. -- Charani (UK) OPC for Walton, Greinton and Clutton, SOM Asst OPC for Ashcott and Shapwick, SOM http://wsom-opc.org.uk http://www.savethegurkhas.co.uk/