Re: Lying on a marriage certificate?

On 4 Jun, 10:14, Kay Robinson <Kay_Robin...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Tue, 3 Jun 2008 02:43:09 -0700 (PDT), JohnB
<johnbo...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> sharpened a new quill and scratched:

---> bobbit

I'd still be interested to know if telling a lie on a marriage
certificate was a risky thing to do.

I do have three marriage certificates, one for each of the marriages
one woman went through. On each she described herself a spinster and
used the names of her mother's previous husband, her first husband and
her second husband as her surname. Took me a year and the purchase of
eight certificates to finally get her birth certificate.

My own maternal grandmother consistantly took five years off her age
on all official records after she lied about it on her marriage
certificate, presumably because her husband was five years younger
than her.

As to risk, I suppose it depends on someone reporting a fact. Only now
that we have computerised indexes do we have the means to quickly
cross-check facts. Any registrar/vicar etc has only the word of the
people in front of him/her that the facts they give are true, so the
risks were small.

Kay

(\__/)
(='.'=) This is Bunny. Copy and paste Bunny into your
(")_(") signature to help him gain world domination.

There's been a good selection of stories back from my original post,
plus one very useful piece of fact (though how much can you believe in
facts? :-) and I'm grateful for all of it. It all helps to get a
grasp of the bigger picture. It seems more and more that the
documents tell the truth as people want it to be told, rather than
necessarily as it really is, and when I first started looking into all
this, I took the "truth" in these records for granted. Now, having
discovered an invented husband, earlier discoveries of age and name
differences seem tame. Are there any bigger lies out there?
Probably :-]
.

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