X00363 Robert Ashton Investigation - Solved!

I was investigating some hints on Ancestry and found that for George Ashton and Alice Butterworth (my 3x great-grandparents), another Ancestry member had listed a child named Robert who was born 1863 and died 1867. The Ancestry member did have GRO Index links for both the birth and the death record. The timing certainly is plausible because the couple did not have any other children born in 1863 (they had children born in 1862 and 1865, from my research). As well, the child would not have lived long enough to have appeared in a census, which is why he could have been missed.Both references are for Blackburn, Lancashire as well, which also makes sense.

So, now that the GRO allows the purchase of digital records for much cheaper now, I decided to get the records that were referenced in the indexes.

Here's the birth record:

The parents are listed as James Ashton and Ellen Blackburn, which clearly doesn't match.

Here's the death record:

The death record lists this child as the son of Robert Ashton, a plasterer. So it's not even the same child as was referenced in the birth record, but again is not a match.

So, neither record is a match and so it would appear that neither record is evidence that George and Alice had a child named Robert.