Find My Past: Marriage Finder – Just Who is it Finding?

I have been trying to locate the marriage record for William Cork to his second wife Jane Dame. They would have married between 1864 and 1866, after the death of his first wife (Feb 1864) and before his son by Jane was born in July 1866. I couldn’t find William with Jane in the Staffordshire records where he had lived previously.  When I looked at the Lancashire records where Jane was from, I found this transcription of a record that had a William Cork married to Susan Speechley.

The index image:

But, then I thought I should try to cross reference the volume and page number with any marriage records for a Jane Dame in the same time period and found this:

When opening the image of the index, you can see it is somewhat hard to read the page number and I can see why they thought it was 382, but it really is 582.   I have no idea who Susan Speechly is, but it isn’t correct.

I thought it was just the bad transcription that caused the mismatched marriage until I tried to look for the marriage record of John Dibben and Olive Bright Marner.  I found John Dibben married in the right location and the right time, but the marriage finder had John Dibben with another woman, Jane Sinclair Bailes. Well, maybe I had the wrong John Dibben?

I looked up Olive Marner and cross-referenced the location, volume and page and I was able to find a correct match. But I guess my great-grandmother was involved in a gay polygamous relationship? Didn’t think they did that in 1869 England….

I have ordered the marriage records through the General Register Office and I should be getting them in a couple of weeks for final confirmation. But the moral is, don’t believe the “Marriage Finder”, do a cross comparison of the location, volume and page to validate if you have the right partner.  And you will have to order the actual records at 9.95 pounds each, but I am sure it will be worth it.