Quick Question?? re Death Certificates

[Peetee]

Could be coincidence, but have you seen on Ancestry.

Name: L H Campbell
Birth Date: abt 1856
Age: 37
Port of departure: New York, New York, United States
Arrival Date: 21 Jun 1893
Port of arrival: Liverpool, England
Ship Name: Majestic
Shipping Line: White Star Line
Official Number: 65925

[erika]

Hi Peetee

Thank you for that. I have seen it before, but couldn't make a definite connection.
My Lachlan Campbell is in Scotland on the 1891 & 1901 Census so not sure it could be the same person.
I've looked for deaths in the States , but nothing concrete arises.

Thanks for your interest

[Peetee]

Other thoughts that might help........ when you're really desperate!!

In the past, when I've been stumped trying to find a death place/date I've statistically profiled deaths. Before Ancestry more fully indexed their post c1920 deaths it was the only way I could find to locate some tricky ones. It did work (twice) with the EVANS surname which isn't that rare.

So, in knowing an exact date of birth, using ancestry, (free BMD didn't extend that far at that stage) I recorded all the death dates, ages at death and districts. Weighted the results and graphed them. This gave me a couple of peaks where there was an especially good match. Fortunately the family was involved with a business and there was enough money around for them to be recorded in the probate register. Knowing the surname and the the year to check then quickly verified the result. How you would verfiy the result without a probate entry I'm not sure.

The second thought, again its quite a bit of work and relies on record office access, is to follow him from a known siting in Aubrey St, forwards in time through the electoral role entries. This is quite time consuming, especially when you're learning how the districts & indexes work.

Both these methods are very time consuming, but sometimes in desperation do work.

[erika]

Sounds good in theory Peetee, but there are just no deaths recorded at all anywhere, anytime

[Peetee]

I had a look at Campbell deaths in Liverpool from 1900 through 1914. Something a bit weird going on there with FreeBMD as for the first few searches nothing came up at all, which I simply didn't believe. Only after a few tries and widening the search, all of a sudden a load came up. But even ignoring the first names nothing that looked promising.

I've been trying to think of some techniques that you can do remotely that have worked for me in the past....

Another is to systematically go through all the known family graves in and around that time. So where you might know one person in them, phone up the relevant cemetery office and enquire as to the rest of the entries.
After that I looked at the people where I didn't know where they were buried and accounted for them too. The upshot of it was some more addresses, some more ancestors and one lady where the surname was correct but I've never found either a birth or a death for her.

Some offices are brilliant and very on the ball, others are slow.

If you're lucky you may hit on him
One advantage with this is that you're working in the prefered way - from the known into the unknown, and also its less reliant on the correct spelling of the name.