WHILST browsing around the Research Guidance section in FamilySearch.org today, purely out of idle interest, I came by chance upon some advice on "estimating dates". I was startled - and not a little horrified - to discover that the LDS are still giving the following advice..... >>Use standard genealogical approximations. From a marriage date estimate that a man was married at age twenty-five and a woman at age twenty-one. You can also estimate that a first child was born one year after the parents' marriage and that subsequent children were born every two years after that.<< >>For example, if a couple married in 1825, you would estimate that the husband was born "abt 1800," the wife was born "abt 1804," their first child was born "abt 1826," their second child was born "abt 1828," and so on.<< The LDS do a lot of outstanding work for us, but this is ludicrous in my opinion. I have been in family history for 25 years and I have never heard of these "standard genealogical approximations" in any book on family history I have ever read or heard any expert lecturer recommend them.These may be "standard genealogical approximations" among American genealogists, but certainly not amongst British ones. I consider it not only bad advice but dangerous! The device of deducting 25 years for a man and 21 years for a woman from a marriage date to arrive at an "About....." birth date is responsible for more erroneous and inaccurate entries on the IGI than virtually any other single feature (apart perhaps from the dreaded "Relative" entries). Time and time again you see private patron submissions in the IGI where someone is shown as having been born in a particular parish "about...." such and such a date when this is not substantiated by any christening entry from the parish registers or BTs under the controlled extraction program. In effect, fictitious people have been invented simply because the submitter has failed to find the person in that parish and just assumed they were born there either 25 years of 21 years before their marriage. You simply cannot assume that everyone - or even a majority - of men married at 25 and women at 21, had their first child a year after the marriage and then produced others at 2-year intervals. This is much too simplistic and misleading an assumption. There are so many different patterns of marriages and child-producing relationships that it is impossible to define one general standard. Many people married in their 30s and 40s etc, and produced children late. Some couples had one child and then not another for 10 years and then produced five more very quickly after that. I have come across entries for my own ancestors on the IGI where clearly the "take off 25 years from a marriage" principle has been used to arrive at an "about" birth date and then found from consulting the original parish registers that both parties were widowed and it was a second marriage when they were in their 50s! I thought this practice of deducting 25 or 21 years from a marriage date to arrive at a supposed birth date had ceased yonks ago and I was amazed to find it still recommended on the LDS site. It can only lead newcomers into bad research practices and I urge everyone to ignore it. Roy Stockdill Editor, The Journal of One-Name Studies The Stockdill Family History Society Web page:- http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/roystock Web page of the Guild of One-Name Studies:- http://www.one-name.org ”Never ask a man if he comes from Yorkshire. If he does he will tell you. If he does not, why humiliate him?" - Canon Sydney Smith (scholar and humorist 1771-1845)