Talk:Finding English Ancestors Not Recorded in the Common Records of Civil Registration, Parish Registers, or Probate Records

why is this page, locked? davide 10:35, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Some Shortcomings
This lecture/paper certainly highlights the significance to family history of doing history rather than merely genealogy (names and dates). However, there are areas of the discussion which require some elaboration: the problems with both parish and census records. For reasons peculiar to each set of documents, their individual reliability has to be, if at all possible, tested against some other documentation. Unfortunately, for those of us whose forebears came from the labouring levels of British society, very often such confirmatory evidence is non-forthcoming. The speaker also dismisses rather too lightly, and particularly in connection with the above sources and their deficiences, the problems caused by one's ancestors having common or garden names. Difficulties furthered, I might add, when the families remain within the same parish over several generations and a couple of generations of siblings, abiding more or less by traditonal naming patterns, overlap their hatches, matches and despatches.

In addition a correction is needed to the subsection on the Army documents, almost certainly the error is a typo: Oliver Cromwell had been dead for over 80 years by 1745. His New Model Army was created 1645, though he attempted to disband it in 1647. By 1655 it was certainly a 'standing army,' the first in English history.