Dorman records - explanatory notes by the compiler Andy Dorman.

This project was set-up initially to try and find the missing elements in my family tree. Since moving into Chippenham I noticed that there were some Dorman's in the 18th century that were born in and around Chippenham, Calne, Salisbury etc
The Counties I started piecing together were Gloucestershire (where I was born) and Wiltshire where I now live. The Gloucestershire Dorman's came to an abrupt end if the late 1790's with no further hints of where they came from.

I decided to look at the Wiltshire Dorman's to see if there was any chance that any of them had moved to Gloucestershire (eg. Bristol). This turned up yet another dead end due to the lack of Dorman's I was finding.

During my research, I found an overlap with Dorman and Dolman in the Calne records. I found this site, conveniently run by Andy Dolman and it proved to be very useful in identifying the Dolman's and overlapping Dorman's.
http://dolmanfamilyhistory.blogspot.com/2007/02/dolman-marriages-wiltshire-1572-1837.html
What I started to amass was a considerable amount of Dolman and Dorman's. As I had reached a dead end as far as Dorman research was concerned, I decided to see if my Ancestors had crossed into Gloucestershire from another county.
What has been done.
I took all the Dorman Birth's from Gloucestershire and entered them into this spreadsheet.
The information I needed was, I assumed, fairly straightforward.
a. Surname
b. Forename(s)
c. Date of Birth
d. Mothers Name
e. Fathers name
f. District
g. County
The Data sources I was going to use were FreeBMD (as I transcribe for them) and the Mormon IGI database. These two sources would provide me with the information I needed but only on a basic level.
It soon became clear that the information from these sources would be too basic and not give me the family linkages that I needed. On that thought, I registered with Ancestry.co.uk to see if I could make better use of the information I had already gathered. The answer came with the Census information that Ancestry.co.uk holds. This provided me with family groups, current locations and county of their births.
It was from the census pages, that I discovered the link between my Warwickshire origins and Longborough in Gloucestershire. Myself and Maurice Sheppard who also has my Dorman ancestry had come to the same conclusion about the Longborough connection but could no provide me with any further information.
For reference, his database can be located at:
http://www.msheppard.com/surnames.htm
Dorman's v Dolman's
For the Dorman's, I started by extracting all the records from the IGI database and using them as the basis for my research.

I then added the FreeBMD records to these and then removed the exact duplicates. At this stage, I was ignoring the name variants such as Dormon, Dormen and Dormand etc. In hindsight, this was mistake and I shaould have just recorded all the name variants as this would have saved me a lot of time in the future.
The Gloucestershire, Warwickshire and Wiltshire Dorman's all appeared in my research and I was a little disappointed with the results as the population didn't give me the complete picture I had originally hoped for. It was at this point, that I stumbled upon the Dolman surname. I had previously ignored them, but I found that the Wiltshire population of Dolman's outweighed the Dorman's by 930 to 31.
It was this realisation that made me pull together all the variants to see if some names had changed over time or the parish records had 'mistakenly' put Dolman instead of Dorman.
Dolman's were much more prolific than Dorman's so I knew I had a lot of work ahead of me, which I am still working on now.
The Process
The first thing I do, is to extract all the Dorman's from the IGI from a specific county and enter the details into my spreadsheet. I go through each record on the IGI to make sure I get the parent details where given. Where I can, I take the same information from the FreeBMD (1837+) database and add those into the spreadsheet.
I then have to take out any exact duplicate records. I do this by creating a unique primary key called WHOID (see the Metadata worksheet for details). I sort the WHOID column into ascending order and then run a VBA Macro that locates and highlights any exact duplicate WHOID numbers. I then have to look at these numbers to check that they are exact duplicates. This is made more awkward as the WHOID uses components of the Parental records. If this is missing (or labelled as [unknown]) the WHOID value is incomplete and may be highlighted as a duplicate when it isn't.
The next step is to find the Death records from the IGI and FreeBMD and try to match the records up with the Births. This was problematic as most Death records did not have an approximate date of birth for the person.

By doing this, I am then able to move onto the Marriage records and try to match those up.
By having minimal records, its very easy to give a birth record a marriage, only to find out that the individual died within a year of birth.
I use an algorithm for the marriage records that works on the basic principle of approximate dates of birth. The ground rule for the algorithm is that males married when they were roughly 24 years of age and females married when they were roughly 21 years of age.

In conjunction with the approximate date of birth, I used the District and County information to make a match that is more than 90% reliable.
This dataset contains the results of my research. Andy Dorman