Soo.......you're name's not Alice Matilda?!!!?

Question

What do we think of this possibility?

A woman marries herself as Alice Matilda and is always known as Alice Matilda, yet the only one who matches on the census (Alice M), has her birth recorded as Alice Mary..........possible? or very unlikely?

She gave her daughter the middle name Mary too...

if its not this girl, im baffled..

:)

Answer 1

Also, old fashioned writing did cause  problems.  My gt grandfather, Elijah Antony, was down in two census records as Elizah Antony (male)  - lower case z's were written very much like lower case j's.  But equally, make sure you have some other corroborating fact before you assume anything!  In addition, the names on the birth certificate are the ones the parents think they will use and they may change their minds before the christening.  someone I was at Uni with, called Carol, had a completely different name on her birth certificate.

Answer 2

Completely possible, and even can be common.

Way back when, people did not have birth certificates (she might), and were not literate. It is totally common that persons show different names during their life. Sometimes only because that is what they chose.

Alice M on the census.. is what the CENSUS taker recorded, based on who answered the door.  You may have the right Alice Matilda, but POSSIBLE that the birth record you find, is some other girl.  The minister who recorded the marriage COULD have been a bit tipsy, and wrote down the wrong middle name, and Alice (who can't read) never knew it.  She COULD HAVE used BOTH as middle names.

To determine if the census is the right family.. you need to compare any siblings, etc to other known records. IE, you already may know she has a brother named Ernie, who appears in the census.

Conflicting records is so common, it is 1/2 the challenge of genealogy.

Answer 3

You're still having problems with her are you? It's very possibe that she married under a different name. I have people in my tree that married under nicknames, middle names and even miss-spelled names. Perhaps she didn't like Mary for herself, so unofficially changed it to Matilda. Perhaps she never realised her name was Alice Mary. I suppose you have to dig a little deeper. Her marriage certificate should show her parents' names, so perhaps you could work it out from this. But, if this is the same person as before, and she was pregnant when she married, perhaps she didn't want to name her parents in case they found out?