A quick and simple blog post to remind everyone to double check their documents, whether new or old. Recently I found an index record at Familysearch that was a perfect fit for my wife’s great-grandparents marriage in Iowa (giving leeway for some obvious surname misspellings, of course.)

So, we ordered a copy of the original and it came very quickly.

However, as I scanned the certificate and became annoyed that their exact dates of birth were missing, I soothed myself with the knowledge that we now had the names of Michael A. Duffy’s parents: Anthony Duffy and Annie O’Hara, as I had read on the index.

Or did we? It turned out the county recording office mistakenly typed in the bride’s surname as the groom’s mother’s surname! That would have spun someone’s wheels for awhile in the next generation or two.

An honest mistake – the county nicely apologized and told us to just send back the certificate for a replacement.