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The Benjamin Soar that married Bertha Painter is the wrong age according to this .

http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=andyhyde1964&id=I4087

The Ben Soar at Sandon street computes as being born 1851 according to the death notice on the previous page . The Ben Soar on the link says he was born 1883.

Might be worth emailing the contact at the top of the page in case he has any other info .

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Re #26, Steven, I think Victorian bureaucracy was, on the whole, pretty accurate - because in general most people had nothing to hide, and were therefore quite honest. But it wasn't like today, where you virtually have to prove that you really exist and that the electricity company knows where to send your bill, just to buy an ice cream. Neither, of course, were there computers to give very quick confirmation that you were who you said you were. As an aside (and I wouldn't want you to think that my forebears were a load of crooks!) my grandmother grew up knowing that her birthday was 21 July 1897, but when she applied for her pension and couldn't produce her birth certificate, the GRO came up with a date of 25 July. It was a mystery to her - but it seems that the birth was registered outside the legal period, and I presume the later date was given to the registrar to avoid a fine for late registration.

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yeah, its interesting stuff. I've seen quite a lot of 'about 18xx' when it comes to some of the birth dates on the older census....

Yup @DaveW. I can see the age gap is a bit too much for those two to get married, by any standards. So I'm left chasing the mysterious Dorothy, potentially of 6 Shakespeare St. I would end the quest at the stage, as the Soar's have now moved out of the house and I should start on the next bunch, BUT, they still own it for a while, as I've seen adverts of Ben jnr renting out flats in it, so they are still caught up in the timeline. Hopefully the chaps down the archive can fill me in via a few electoral roles...

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