Genealogy Chat

I have come across several cases of Irish births where I have both the Civil Birth Record and the Church Baptism Record from Roots Ireland but the baptism date is earlier than the birth date ! I am sure it is the same people in each pair of records.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is it likely that the parents falsified the date of birth for fear of being fined because they left it beyond the 21-day limit to register the birth?

Possibly two children. not unusual no name a second after the child that died.

How early are we talking?

How much of a discrepancy is there in the dates you have found?

Have you seen the actual birth certs and parish records or just transcriptions?

I had previously come across my Great-Grandmother who had 25 children in 23 years which included 7 sets of twins. In the cases of 6 of the sets of twins, one was born very prematurely and did not survive more than a few days.. The other was born between 12 and 106 days later. I read that this may have been due to a rare condition called uterus didelphys or "double uterus". In 4 of these cases the 2nd twin was given the same name as the 1st who had died before their birth. In addition to this there were 4 instances of two single-birth children being given the same name because the first had died, usually a year or two between them.

All of the records for the above from Roots Ireland contained both the Birth and Baptism dates in the same record in each case so I'm sure all were different children.

In the cases of the births mentioned in my original post, I have separate Birth and Baptism records each only showing the one date, with the Birth being about a month after the Baptism. If these were twins I would expect there to be a Birth and a Baptism record for each.

All the records are Transcriptions, and yes, I'm aware of the possibility of mistakes but I'm talking about 5 cases from 2 Mothers. I've not seen the actual Civil Birth records and photocopies of Irish Church records are not available because the Registers cannot be removed or damage being risked in the photocopying process.

Can you post the details and perhaps others might find an explanation? Have you looked for the births on the Civil Registration Index. Were these births in Southern or Northern Ireland?

The Births were in 1864/69/80/84/92. All of these were before the partition of Ireland so North/South is not really relevant. For your info, though, they were in Counties Donegal and Monaghan in the present-day republic of Ireland.

On the assumption that one date is correct and the other wrong, I would guess that the Baptism is correct as the Priest was present at the time and he recorded the date, whereas a parent could mis-report the Birth date at the Registration Office without the Authorities being any the wiser (there being no need for the child to be present).

P.S. Without actually going to Ireland, the Civil Registrations can only be checked via sites such as Roots Ireland, Family Search, etc.

Shame the births weren't in the North as it is possible to view original Civil Registrations entries on the GRONI site. For a short time it was also possible to view them on this site for the whole of Ireland up until partition and the South after that:

http://www.irishgenealogy.ie/en/

but the facility was withdrawn as there were complaints about the records being used in identity fraud. It says on the site that they are hoping to reinstate the facility, so keeping watching that space! I did find some records for my relatives before the withdrawal.

The indexes can also be checked on Ancestry. There, the other marriages with the same refs are listed.