Mea Culpa (or not - delete as appropriate)

On reflection, I was a little harsh in my comments yesterday. I first began to look for my grandmother's birth certificate in the 1960s when I was in my salad days and green in judgement. I had no reason to doubt what my family told me about her date and place of birth. But even if I did doubt it, where should I look instead? There were dozens of people with the same name registered in the 5 years surrounding her suggested birth date. The crucial piece of evidence was the 1891 census and despite what I said yesterday, I cannot have looked at that in Portugal Street - it wasn't released until January 1992. In 1992 I had a lot of things going on in my life and family history was not at the forefront. I suspect I've never actually looked in the 1891 census until my wife found it last September. But even if I had looked, without a name index, and not knowing the address, it would have been distinctly like a needle in a haystack. Anyway, enough already, let me say some more about my research agenda.

If I am to add a generation to each family line, I have 38 research tasks - looking for 25 births (or baptisms), 9 marriages and 4 other tasks. Among the births and marriages, 3 are in the 17th century, 22 in the 18th, 8 in the 19th, before civil registration and 1 in the 19th century after civil registration. The 4 "others" are confirming links in the chain which if wrong could lead me to research someone else's family. One is a fairly common task - confirming that a marriage I have found does belong to a family of the same name baptising children. The second is also fairly straight forward. I received half a dozen generations of one family line from another researcher. I need to confirm these. The third "other" is probably also faced by many family historians. Over the course of 4 generations, I have large numbers of people in a village in Nottinghamshire with the same names. I have used baptisms, burials, MIs and wills to sort out how they fit into families, but I need to check my logic to make sure it is watertight. The final "other" involves a published pedigree. My research seems to suggest that there is an error in Hunter's Familiae minorum gentium, but I need to make sure I am right.

That's the agenda - any bets on how far I get?