It is not unusual to find inconsistencies in a set of BDM certificates for members of a family. There are a number of reasons: * people tell lies to cover up illegitimacy by altering dates or ages of the child's birth or the marriage (common on birth certificates) * men lie about their date of birth to join the military when they are too young or too old to do so (very common in World War 1 enlistments) * the people providing the information for the certificate may have forgotten or simply don't know (e.g. a son-in-law as an informant for a death certificate) or be too emotional (particularly with a death) to provide the information correctly * adoptions were informal and the names of adopted children may or may not be listed on certificates depending on the knowledge and mood of the informant * once a lie appears in one place (e.g. a birth certificate), it may be copied (in the belief it is the truth) onto other certificates (e.g. marriage and death) * immigration means that grandchildren may grow up on the other side of the world from their grandparents and therefore may not even know their names to provide for their parents' death certificates Then you get all the problems that occur even when people do provide the correct information: * the handwriting is hard to read and is mis-transcribed into the original registers or into the computer based records from which certificates are printed these days * the clerk at the time didn't know how to spell a name (particularly a foreign one) * people with foreign names anglicise them * people from other countries write their numbers differently (e.g. the German 1 and 7) * certificates extracted today are subject to current laws which may suppress information present in the original records (e.g. Qld birth certificates today do not show the date of parents' marriage even though the information was collected for many years in the register) * people are terrible with arithmetic and can't accurately work out the age of children even if they remember the dates of birth etc So family history isn't really a matter of "proof" but more a matter of drawing your own conclusions from whatever clues may be available. Even "official records" like birth certificates should be treated as clues. They are simply what the informant said about the event that then got transcribed and copied and transcribed and encoded and ultimately printed onto the certificate in your hands; plenty of scope for errors, omissions, etc. Even if you have a scan of the register, that isn't the original source of the information, merely the registrar's recording of it. As a consequence, you can get the situation where two family members can look at that same set of "evidence" and draw different conclusions based on it, as one may reject a certificate as being "too different" in the details to be accepted as pertaining to their family, while another person may choose to accept it and incorporate it and base further decisions on it, resulting in quite different family trees. Kerry "Kerry raymond" <kraymond@iprimus.com.au>