Hi Bruce,

Thanks for the interest and help. Yes there do appear to be date errors! I hope to resolve some of these but I am not sure what happened to Elizabeth in '61 or Jane in '61 and '71. The '71 census is, for Jane, about the time that she was having Elizabeth (?Gick/Skelly) but she had to be somewhere.

The date errors are, in find, something confined to, but frequent with, my middle aged female relatives. I do not know if the practice of lying about age is confined to my gene pool, or a commoner phenomenon but I do find that they tend to become younger during middle age, and then age more rapidly towards what we now think of as pensionable age. It happens in Man and Liverpool with mine :-)

Thought you might just be interested in their ages as per each census, for a bit of fun.

Census of 1841 51 61 71 81
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Anne Skelly 30 40 45 52 67
Elizabeth Skelly - 6 ? 26 32
Jane Skelly 4 14 ? ? 44
John Christian - - - 4 13
Elizabeth Gick - - - 4 14

Jane and Elizabeth are truthful, although Elizabeth starts to slip a little in '81. Ann looks to have been the worst offender. I have no '91 data, other than knowing that Jane died in '87

Again many thanks for the helpful pointers

Paul