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10:13am on Sunday, 6th June, 2021:
Outburst
Because I've been exceptionally busy for the past few weeks, I thought I'd relax this weekend by doing a bit more genealogy research.
Where I left off last time (a couple of months or more ago), I was looking for all the marriages of someone with the surname Wighton in Scotland 1690-1770. I'd got as far in the alphabet as John, so it was Margaret next. I made a note that this was on page 6 of the search on Findmypast. I repeated the search yesterday and it only came up with 3 pages. I tried it again today and it came up with the same 3 pages. I'd recorded all the names on these three pages up to Margaret, but I'd also recorded a bunch more.
I checked with Ancestry, and they didn't have the 3 pages from Findmypast, but they had the rest. These were sourced from the Familysearch site (that is, the Church of Latter-Day Saints, also known as the Mormons). It looks, therefore, as if the Findmypast search is not pulling records from its LDS database. Sure, I could get them from Ancestry or Familysearch, but they don't come up in alphabetical order on those.
This kind of annoyance happens all the time on these genealogy sites. If it weren't for the fact I'd already found over a hundred of the marriage records I was looking for, I wouldn't necessarily have known I was only receiving partial data. Although the LDS records are very patchy and often mistranscribed, they're useful because they can be used to identify the original records, scans of which are available (but cost £) from Scotlandspeople.
Maybe I'll try another day (if my Internet connection holds up: my service provider didn't connect its payments database to the Lloyds Bank direct debit system last month and they're cross with me for not paying them).
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