Marie Family Finder is simply what FMP call their matching facility. It works exactly the same way as Freebmd by looking for all the people on the same page. Obviously it works best post 1912 when the spouses surname is included in the indexes. As you say if you look at the entry on FreeBMD and Ancestry then there are two women named rather than the one on findmypast. However there is one one male name whereas there should be two and that is when the alarm bells should start ringing. Whichever site you use the number of names produced should always be in pairs as it takes two people to make a marriage. So it could be two or four. However if it is earlier than 1851 then it could also be six or eight as the early forms at the GRO had four entries to a page. As you say the only way to be sure (prior to 1912) is to find the original marriage entry. Now whilst parish records will give you most it will not give you all of them. There is one other useful source and that is the LocalBMD projects - you can check these out on the UKBMD website at http://ukbmd.org.uk/local_bmd - certainly for Lancashire and Cheshire I know exactly who married who and where. So back to Thomas Fowler in 1888. FREEBMD has for Ref 2b 1066 in 1888 Alverstoke Emma CHURCHER - Thomas FOWLER and Minnie FRANCIS The name missing from the FMP indexes is Emma Churcher and a search of their indexes for her shows that they have transcribed the reference as 2B 1056 not 2B 1066 as FreeBMD. Now there are a number of trees on ancestry and they show that she married Thomas FOWLER. So the question has to be what happened to Minnie FRANCIS? She has no matches in Ancestry trees to help but if you search findmypast for her there are again two males and one female. This time the male names are Thomas FOWLER and Walter Paine. Now Walter PAINE on FreeBMD has a reference of 2b 1056 not 2b 1066. I have checked the image on FreeBMD and it should be page 1066 so I have submitted the correction. So it looks like the correct entry for FREEBMD should have four names and from the ancestry result we can say that Thomas FOWLER married Emma CHURCHER and Walter PAINE married Minnie FRANCIS However the only way to be certain is to get the certificates. So back to basics - if FreeBMD returns an odd number of entries then you need to investigate further Regards John Hanson, researcher, the Halsted Trust, http://www.halstedresearch.org.uk New family history conference in 2018 http://www.secretlives.org.uk -----Original Message----- From: GOONS [mailto:goons-bounces+john.hanson=one-name.org@rootsweb.com] On Behalf Of Marie Byatt Sent: 27 April 2017 21:43 To: goons@rootsweb.com Subject: Re: [G] FMP Errors I believe marriage finder relies on a person supplying the information either because they have the certificate or by other means - perhaps FMP has a means of crosschecking on parish records. Actually, I don't rely much on the marriage index at all - I've just had too many mistakes. I downloaded a spreadsheet of the possible marriages and then went to Family Search and Ancestry and did a search on marriages for my study name in the right time period. BOth sites return church records as well as the index records. So I harvested all the church records and ticked off the appropriate lines in the spreadsheet. This left me with about 10% unknown. Next step was to use the censuses to find the new families and see what the spouses name was. At this point, Out of 3900 marriage I'm still missing about 50 spouses. But I'm in the middle of doing a recheck so it will probably diminish some more. Then I either get a film from Family Search or I call in favors. Thanks to Ancestry, Family Search and various parish register films, I have about 2000 digital images of marriages - trying for the rest. It's funny really as England is the only place that makes marriages so difficult - in every other country if the marriage is registered and I can find the registration - I usually get the spouse name as well. Canadian records are great as are French - right back into the 1700sboth sets of parents and sometimes grandparents - love those. Marie (GOONS 5318) Bringing the world together one surname at a time. 'A Pepler Name' http://pepler.tribalpages.com 'Hedgerow - the Ancestors' http://cranberry.tribalpages.com Pepler DNA Study http://www.familytreedna.com/public/pepler-ow/ 'Scroops, Scropes and Scroopes' http://dentonlk.tribalpages.com 'Peplers and Peplows' pepler.one-name.net ________________________________ From: Robert Fowler <rlkfowlerons@gmail.com> To: Goons Forum <goons@rootsweb.com> Sent: Thursday, April 27, 2017 12:54 PM Subject: [G] FMP Errors One more for the road, Alton Sep 1891 2c 319 FMP "marriage finder" definitively advises Ben L F m Mary Ann White FreeBMD & Ancestry have standard 4 man options. I still do not understand what Marriage Finder does, apart from jerking my chain! Is FMP strewn with such errors - I have only looked a A... RDs so far. Is there a shortcut to marriage sets that FMP does have, but the other don't ?? Robert _____________________________________________ Information and admin page: http://one-name.org/guild-information-administration/ ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to GOONS-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message _____________________________________________ Information and admin page: http://one-name.org/guild-information-administration/ ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to GOONS-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message