Omitted Portsea burial registers page

I recently discovered that a page in the burial register of St Mary in Portsea never got scanned.  I suspect this was because it was a loose page and got missed when FindmyPast did the scanning of the registers for the Portsmouth History Centre.

Mention was made in the Hampshire Chronicle of the death of Mrs. MITCHELL in July 1845 who lived in Mile End in Landport, Portsea. She was at that time the widow of Thomas Mitchell of the Royal Marines, and her father was Captain BAMBER RN. I was hoping to confirm what her christian name was and when she was buried. Knowing that the Portsmouth registers had been digitized by Findmypast I did a search to find the image of the burial which would confirm what I was looking for. At least I confirmed what her name was from the GRO index but after making many attempts with different variations, her burial would not appear in the Findmypast index. What I did next was to look for her burial in the HGS Burial Index which I found confirming her names as being Harriet Ann Mary Sophia, her age was 45 and that she was buried on 10 July in St Mary, Portsea.

This at least confirmed that there was a burial entry in the register but when searching, again it still could not be found. What I did manage to find was other burials in the same year which I could see on the screen, so I then paged through the images looking for a burial recorded on 10 July but it was not there. What then became apparent was that due to the register being in a poor state there were a number of loose pages and the one with the date I was looking had not been scanned. Between the last burial of John DAWSON on 6 July and an infant URRY from the workhouse on 17 July there were a total of 16 missing burials.

This just goes to show that the data on our HGS indexes is still very useful and should never be ignored and forgotten.

Roy Montgomery
HGS Researcher