William Finch (1835-1912)

There was always a problem with the identity of William who was born in 1835 and, therefore, before civil registration in 1837. It was difficult to locate William and even harder to differentiate one William from another. This was my only experience of paying for a records agent but more about that at a later date.

To make things more difficult than they may be, there are two “William Finch” boys born in 1835 and in the same village of Standish.

The IGI shows the issue as follows:-

WM FINCH - International Genealogical Index
Gender: Male Christening: 15 FEB 1835 Standish, Lancashire, England

WILLIAM FINCH - International Genealogical Index
Gender: Male Christening: 27 DEC 1835 Standish, Lancashire, England

For someone without access to paper records it would have been impossible to differentiate the two births and in the early 1980’s when this research started it was almost impossible to find the correct William and then to try and disentangle identity from a distance.

What about the paper record? Well, the paper record would not help us if we were looking at birth records and so we are looking at marriage records for William who married after civil registration and this did prove to be effective.

Starting from the ‘known’ and moving away to the ‘unknown’ Richard Finch gave us his birth certificate and then the marriage certificate of his parents and his father’s name was William with a calculated year of birth but more importantly a father’s name of ‘John’. This allowed a clear, evidenced and demonstrable way of separating the two Williams born in Standish and ‘our’ William is born at the end of the year rather than the beginning.

Starting from the ‘known’ and moving away to the ‘unknown’ is the standing operating procedure in genealogy and with William it paid dividends.