Death By Lion

On reading the Star Letter in the September issue regarding the perils of not checking sources, I was reminded of something I came across several years ago in the transcriptions on an Online Parish Clerks (OPC) website. I won’t name the parish because I don’t want to undermine the excellent work that they do in providing information.

I was reading through the transcriptions of burial records of a parish I had ancestors from, and was interested to see that they included notes apparently written in a side column by the minister as to the cause of death.

My attention was grabbed by one entry that said that the cause of death was “a discaved lion”. My imagination ran riot trying to think how that scenario could have come about. Could the lion have escaped from a circus and been living in a cave, before attacking some poor passer-by, or someone trying to remove it from the cave? Is “discaved” even a word? Should I try to look up a newspaper of the day?

Fascinated, I found the original burial record and laughed out loud when I realised that the actual cause of death was “a diseased liver”! Much less exciting, perhaps, but definitely much more likely.

So yes, as Penney Thompson says, a mistranscribed word or two can make all the difference. Val van Raay, Australia

EDITOR REPLIES:

This made me laugh too. As anyone who has ever taken part in our annual Transcription Tuesday event will know, it’s not always as easy to read old handwriting as you might hope. Still, I think it is great that websites like OPC ones and FreeREG (freereg.org. uk) include the marginalia that some incumbents included in their registers, even if they do sometimes misread them.