Penistone

New Month Old Post: first posted 26th June, 2018.

All books can be indecent books
Though recent books are bolder,
For filth, I'm glad to say, is in
The mind of the beholder.
When correctly viewed,
Everything is lewd
                                  (Tom Lehrer)

I came across a previously undiscovered great-great-great aunt in the family history resources, and have been tracing her descendants. This sounds obsessive, but I find it intriguing because most of my ancestors were from the same area, and so many of us remained there that I keep finding people I know who are not-so-distant relatives. For example, one lad with whom I went all the way through secondary school in the same class turned out to be a third cousin, as was another who stayed with a family near to where I was on the school foreign exchange trips to Belgium, although we had absolutely no idea of the connections. 

One family name I have been investigating is Penistone. You might find this, with its rude connotations, implausible or amusing, but it is very common in parts of Yorkshire. 

I do see the funny side of it myself. My brother had a friend called Penistone, whose wife was appalled when, newly married, she received her new driving licence to discover that in those days the driver number always began with the first five letters of the surname. And a group of us from school had to suppress our sniggers when travelling between Sheffield and Manchester by train on the now-closed Woodhead line in the presence of a teacher, and the train stopped in the small Yorkshire town of Penistone (near where we now live). Two girls were adamant the station sign had a gap between the S and the T. Then there were the tales of people in the early days of the internet, who were unable to enter their names or addresses on internet forms because filters were cruder than the words they were supposed to filter out; those named Penistone from Penistone or Scunthorpe particularly affected. Yes, I’m glad it’s not my name. 

My research, however, has been made unnecessarily difficult by inaccuracies in the data on Ancestry.com – the genealogical resource I use. Time and time again, Penistone has been transcribed at Penestone or Panistone or numerous other variations, with the effect that searching the indexes produces incomplete results. For example, if you look for all the Penistones in the village of Snaith in the 1891 and 1901 censuses, you will find Panistones and Pennistones, even Kenistons, but hardly a Penistone in sight.

There are so many spurious entries in the indexes – literally hundreds and possibly thousands – that it cannot be due to error. A handful, perhaps, but not hundreds. Most of the original sources from which the indexes are drawn are clear as the top line of an optician’s chart, so it is as if some transcribers have deliberately chosen not to write down the name Penistone, but written something else instead. It would also be difficult to mistake Penistone for Penestone when transcribing an index because they appear in alphabetical order, so Penistone would be after Penfold and not before. 

Some of these records came from another resource called FreeBMD where they appear correctly. Thousands of volunteers contributed to its transcription – I was one – which is why it is a free resource on Ancestry. But they have been altered. Has someone carried out a global substitution? Could it be prudery – bowdlerisation on a massive scale? Could it have anything to do with Ancestry’s Mormon origins? Without insider knowledge, one can only speculate about the history of these mistranscriptions. 

The first rule for any genealogical transcriber is that you record what is there, even if obviously wrong. If someone’s name appears in an original source as Taster Dunman, you record it as Taster Dunman, even if you know it should be Tasker Dunham. There is no excuse for recording Penistone as Penestone or Peinistone or Panistone. If it says Penistone you record it as Penistone, and if it says Stiffcock, you write it down as Stiffcock, no matter how offensive you think it is.