Everyone makes mistakes

I know. A shame. Being from Co. Durham it is one of my must go to websites, the details that are included put Ancestry and Family Search to shame. I once met the founder George Turns during a visit to the record office in 2016. I was very impressed by his dedication to completeness and accuracy. I saw volunteers with local knowledge transcribing from the original registers and microfilms, comparing and discussing queries amongst themselves; meanwhile George himself was checking previous transcriptions against the source material before it would be put up on the website. Another good local website is the "Durham Mining Museum".

 

You may well be right - that was always the alternative explanation. I didn't favour it because it means the parents gave a boy a name strongly marked as female, and there would then be a lot of other coincidences. However, after a little more research, I'm beginning to suspect that giving child a name like that may cause some of the apparent coincidences. Someone copying or transcribing a record sees the name and jumps to the wrong conclusion, and writes F or Girl instead of M or Boy. The copy of the birth register would then be an example of that.

So I shall keep looking. This is in the twentieth century, so more looking usually does provide more evidence. Sometimes that's good; in this case I seem to have talked myself into a lot more work on someone not that close to my ancestral line! Oh well ...

 

I’m always right!

Seriously, though, registration errors corrected at the time were just initialled. Those corrected later should have a date of correction and some kind of explanatory note.

 

Victorian (Australia) actually - there would have been at least 2 registers for Australia - one at the church and one at the register office. At least I'm fairly sure that's how it worked. So I would presume that they read the father's name from the church register and then didn't look at the church register again while filling out all the sections for the groom.

 

It is a badly written (or copied) "5" ....... it says 1850