Another weird coincidence!

[Somerset Sal]

I've been going round in circles trying to pin down the members of my 4x gt g'pa's family. It's been made really confusing by the existence of a family with similar names and ages. Today I realised that the only thing to do was to find his dopple ganger in the censuses and prove to myself that I'm not going mad and that there really are two very similar families. I found:

My Thomas Hurst was born in 1783; the other was born in 1784.
They both had wives called Jane
They both had a daughter called Maria born in 1817
They both had a daughter called Mary born in 1821
They both had a daughter called Ann born in 1824
They both had a daughter called Louisa; one Louisa was born in 1832, the other in 1833.

Is it any wonder I got confused?

[Little Nell]

Yes I've found this sort of wierdness before, but not quite so many coincidences in one family. My big bugbear is that I have an Adam Dunt in my family tree who was baptised in the same small village a year before another Adam Dunt, who was a distant cousin. One of them is the one who appears in censuses - but how can I tell if he's "my" Adam Dunt or not?

[Somerset Sal]

Yes I've found this sort of wierdness before, but not quite so many coincidences in one family. My big bugbear is that I have an Adam Dunt in my family tree who was baptised in the same small village a year before another Adam Dunt, who was a distant cousin. One of them is the one who appears in censuses - but how can I tell if he's "my" Adam Dunt or not?

You'd expect that an unusual name like DUNT would make life simple, wouldn't it? But it doesn't always: I have a very, very unusual maiden name, something like BXQJ (can't put the real name here because of the board policy about living people). My Dad's name is David John BXQJ and we'd always thought he was the only person alive with that name. But we now know that he has a very distant cousin who has exactly the same name.

[Jac]

I have had the same prob with my Charles Woodage there are two of them but born in different places although families from same area of Berks. I know mine as he was born in Ham surrey but he is not on the 1901 census so some people following the same family line assume that the other one belongs to my family very frustrating especially when they don't alter their trees after being corrected. No wonder mistakes happen