I'm currently helping someone gather documents for their application for Irish Foreign Birth Registration - he's an Australian whose family migrated from Ireland in the early 20th century.
For his Irish grandfather, we've obtained a birth certificate from Ireland, and a marriage certificate plus death certificate from New South Wales, Australia. However, there's some discrepancies between the two.
New South Wales marriage and death certificates do not state the person's date of birth, merely their age in years. Unfortunately, the age on both these certificates is inconsistent with the birth certificate by 2 years.
On the other hand, we also have a personnel record from the grandfather's former employer (the state railways) which has a DOB exactly matching the Irish birth certificate. We also have an Australian death certificate for the great-grandfather, which lists the age of his children, and the age of the grandfather given there is consistent with the Irish birth certificate. Given this, and the fact that all the other details on the birth certificate are matching, I'm reasonably confident that we have the birth certificate for the right person (though I am chasing up some further records to confirm this).
My question is, then: how will the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs treat this? Will they accept a 2 year discrepancy in age/date of birth as "close enough" given that these are old documents? Will they ask further questions, or ask us to get the Australian authorities to amend the death certificate?
Additionally, the spelling of the surname is different between the Irish and Australian paperwork - I expect that the Irish authorities are well aware of how Irish surnames are spelled a million different ways, but will it cause any trouble?
