This concerns Irish Marriage Registers
I am indexing an 1862 Irish Marriage Register and ran into something new that I hadn't seen with other records. Where the name of the groom is listed, it listed, "Catherine, Neal McLaughlin." Obviously, the given name of the person is Neal, and not Catherine Neal. I saw more instances in the same batch where there was this same anomaly. Another example, "Mary, Patrick Doherty." Most of the records just list a groom's name, without an additional name and comma before it.
I'd like a response from an Irish records expert and not someone's else's guess. What is this? What was the registrar trying to communicate when he added this extra first name that certainly doesn't belong to the groom? This is just for my information in researching records.
Answers
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To Genthusiast, thanks for responding! I went back and reviewed the batch which I had not submitted, and found what the answer was. I thought I was dealing with marriages, but they were actually baptisms, as you just mentioned! So Catherine was the daughter of Neal, and Mary was the daughter of Patrick. Glad I suspended indexing this batch so that I could return and do it right.
What I learned is that on some of the records of the register, the name of the child ended up on the same line as the groom, separated by a comma. On most of the other records, the first name of the child was on the second line under the date of baptism.
Again, thanks Genthusiast!
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