Newsletter
- 10th January 2015
Nottinghamshire transcriptions go online
ScotlandsPeople add more BMDs
New Year Competition extended WIN UP TO £150 IN CASH!!
MASTERCLASS: Tracking down pre-1837
baptisms and marriages
How to be accurate - and why it
matters!
Using Family Tree Analyzer to spot
errors
Checking your My Ancestors entries
Online will service still isn't working
perfectly
Frustrated with Findmypast?
Reading between the lines
Rags to riches - how a laundry maid
became a Viscountess!
Mystery artist identified
Birthday Book puzzle solved?
Review: A Suitable Young Man
Genealogy in the Sunshine - more places released
Stop Press
The LostCousins newsletter is usually published
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of this newsletter available!
Nottinghamshire transcriptions go online
This week Findmypast have made available
online over 1.75 million parish records for Nottinghamshire which have been
transcribed by members of the Nottinghamshire Family History Society. You can
find out more here.
ScotlandsPeople add more BMDs
On 1st January each year ScotlandsPeople
add an extra year of birth, marriage and death registers to their online
collection. This year the additions are 1914 births, 1939 marriages, and 1964
deaths.
What a shame we aren't allowed to see
the equivalent registers for England & Wales - those Scrooges at the GRO in
Southport are still insistent on sticking with the paper-based system devised
before Queen Victoria came to the throne.
Their attitude seems to be "If it
was good enough for King William IV it should be good enough for you"!
All I can say is "Bah, humbug"
(to quote Charles Dickens)!
New Year Competition extended WIN UP TO £150 IN CASH!!
As so many members didn't receive my
Christmas newsletter until this week (because it went to their office email
address) the closing date for the New Year Competition has been extended - the
winners will now be chosen on Tuesday 3rd February.
The competition is open to ALL
LostCousins members who joined before midnight on Christmas Eve - you don't
need to be a subscriber, or to be taking part in the LostCousins project.
To have a chance of winning the First Prize
of a One-Year Subscription to Deceased Online, the only website specialising in records from local councils,
AND up to £150 in cash simply use your My Referrals page (or your personal referral link, which you'll
find on your My Summary page) to
invite a fellow family historian - whether a friend or relative - to join
LostCousins.
There are also 10 Runners-Up prizes -
each will get a FREE one-year LostCousins subscription worth up to £12.50, AND
a FREE digital photo repair/restoration worth up to £8.99 donated by Repixl, who have already produced stunning results for hundreds
of LostCousins members.
Here are some suggestions for people to
invite:
There's another set of prizes for the
new members you sign up - the First Prize is up to £150 in cash, and there are
also 10 Runners-Up prizes (as above). Please see this article
in my last newsletter for full details of the competition.
Tip:
if you received this email at your work address please
consider using your personal email address instead - so many of the best
offers are at weekends or holiday times.
MASTERCLASS: Tracking
down pre-1837 baptisms and marriage
Researching ancestors who lived in
England & Wales is usually fairly straightforward until we get back to
1841, the date of the first census, and 1837, the year that civil registration
began. But then it becomes much tougher, for a number of inter-related reasons.
In this masterclass I'm going to first talk through the problems, and
then explain how you can overcome them.
Why we need to use different techniques
When we're researching after 1837 we
can refer to the GRO indexes, which (in theory at least) list everyone who was
born, or married, or died in England & Wales. Once we get to 1841 we can
refer to censuses which (again, in theory) list everyone in the country on a
certain night. Best of all, those indexes and censuses are available online, so
anybody anywhere can get access to them.
But before 1837 we don't have either of
those available to us - prior to the introduction of civil registration parish
registers are by far the best sources of early information (and often the only
surviving documents that name our ancestors). Most people were
baptised, most of those who have descendants alive today got married, and the
one thing you can be sure of is that they eventually died, in which case
they'll almost certainly have been buried somewhere.
However, even though the vast majority
of baptism, marriage, and burial registers have survived, the registers are
scattered across the nation. In most cases the original registers are held by
the county record office, which means you cannot go to any one record office -
not even the National Archives - and expect to find all the baptisms for (say)
1797. Indeed, even if you visit the repository of the registers you're seeking
the chances are you'll only be able to view them on microfilm.
Many registers have been transcribed,
often by volunteers, and in some cases the transcriptions have been made
available online. However you can't just go to one website and search through
every parish register that has ever been transcribed, because some
transcriptions are available at one site, some at another - and even if you
have the time to visit them all, many of the transcriptions are only available
at subscription sites, so you may not be able to access them. Furthermore, some
of the transcriptions are only available on CD ROM or on microfiche - usually through
family history societies - and many registers have NEVER been transcribed
Faced with such a different situation
some researchers just give up - research pre-1837 is so different that they are
scared to even try. Some try, but fail - either because they don't fully
understand how best to make use of the available resources, or because they
don't realise just how much is available to them.
Because of the way that records are
scattered across the country, across the Internet, and across different media,
it's tempting to adopt an unfocused "where shall I try next"
approach. Now, I'm not a professional genealogist, but one thing I do know is
that professional genealogists always search logically and methodically, and
above all they record where they have searched and what
they have searched for. I can't count the number of times members have
written to me saying they've searched everywhere for a certain baptism, yet when
pressed they can't tell me which parishes they've searched, which periods the
searches covered, or even - in some cases - precisely what surnames and
spellings they looked for.
Start by gathering the evidence
First collect all the evidence that
indicates - no matter how obliquely - where and when your ancestor is likely to
have been born. Sources of information will often include early censuses,
marriage certificates, and death certificates - all of which can be helpful,
but can also be misleading.
Many people didn't know where they were
born, so often the birthplace they gave when the enumerator came round is the
place - or one of the places - where they grew up. Some people didn't know how
old they were - they might have known when they were born, but
that isn't the question on the census form. It asks for their age, and not
everyone was capable of subtracting one year from another, particularly if the
years were in different centuries.
Remember too, that it was the
householder who was responsible for completing the form (or supplying the
information to the enumerator) - the ages and birthplaces of adopted children,
stepchildren, servants and visitors are particularly unlikely to be correct.
Search the IGI
Your next step will often be to search
the International Genealogical Index at FamilySearch; the IGI probably has more
parish register entries than any other website, and yet it's free! Now and
again I'm lucky enough to find someone who looks as if they may be my
ancestor, and has a sufficiently rare name that there are
unlikely to have been two of them around in the same place at the same time.
However, not many names are that rare - indeed, many of the surnames we now
think of as rare were once quite common in certain parts of the country.
Tip: some researchers assumed that the
IGI disappeared along with the old FamilySearch website. It's true that there
was a time when the IGI was not available at the new FamilySearch site, but you
can now find it here.
There are two types of entries in the
IGI - those that are described as Community Indexed and those
that are Community Contributed. The former are extremely reliable,
but the latter are very variable - for example, there are many entries which
are clearly not taken from parish registers and are often simply conjecture.
It's perhaps just as well that the two sets can only be searched separately!
If you don't find the entry you're
seeking in the IGI it's usually because the register that contains the entry
hasn't been transcribed and included in the index. Although FamilySearch has at
some point microfilmed most of the surviving parish registers, only about half
have been transcribed and indexed - so half the baptisms and marriages you're
looking won't be in the database at all.
Tip: hardly any burials for England
& Wales are included in the IGI.
How can you find out which
registers are included? The simplest way is to refer to Steve
Archer's site (which covers
Scotland and Ireland as well as England & Wales). As well as listing the
years of coverage by parish and by event the site also gives the relevant batch
numbers - searching by batch number is not only a great way to limit your
search to a specific parish, it's a great way to overcome transcription errors
or entries that have been recorded incorrectly by the clergyman who conducted
the service (when you omit the person's name you'll get a listing of all the
entries in the batch).
What should you do if the parish you're
interested in is included in the IGI, but you still can't find the entry you're
looking for despite searching through the relevant batch (in case there has
been a major transcription error)? This suggests that the event didn't take
place where you think it did, or when you think it did - or didn't take place
at all (not all children were baptised).
Find out which other parishes are
nearby
There are at least two ways to do this.
One is to use a 'parish locator' (such as the free ParLoc program) to get a list of all the parishes
around the town or village where you believe your ancestor to have been born or
married. In the country you might use a 5 mile radius, but in London that could
give you a list of 100 or more parishes - so a radius of 1 or 2 miles might be
more appropriate.
Tip: the nearest parish church may have been in a different parish - the
size and shape of parishes varies enormously.
The fact that I haven't been able to
find the baptism or marriage in the IGI strongly suggests that it's recorded in
a register that isn't included in that index, so I go back to Steve Archer's invaluable
website to find out which parishes aren't included in the IGI for the relevant
period - and they’re the ones that I focus my attention on.
However my preferred solution is to use
the maps at FamilySearch - these
are wonderful but only cover England & Wales.
At the old FamilySearch site you were
limited to the IGI, which hadn't been added to for many years - but the new
FamilySearch site has a wealth of other records. For example, there are 69
million baptisms in the dataset described as England, Births and
Christenings, 1538-1975, and 16 million marriages under England,
Marriages,1538-1973. Many of these entries are
also found in the IGI, but some are different. I believe these records sets are
based on the Vital Record Index which was previously distributed on CD ROM.
Tip: those records can also be searched at Findmypast.
FamilySearch has indexed transcriptions,
but not images, for Cheshire, Plymouth & West Devon, Yorkshire, and Wales,
and many images, mostly indexed, for Norfolk.
FamilySearch also has parish register images for part of Kent, but these are
not generally accessible online unless you are at a FamilySearch Centre (there
are 4500 of them around the world). There are also many images that can only be
viewed at partner sites, such as Ancestry or Findmypast - so you'll need a
subscription for the partner site. In practice you'll probably find it easier
to search these records at Ancestry or Findmypast rather than hopping from one
site to another.
Although you
can search all of the transcribed parish register entries with a single search
from the FamilySearch home page, you won't find any records that are only
present as unindexed images. It's therefore essential that you're aware of the unindexed
images at the FamilySearch site that may be of relevance to your research.
To find out
which records FamilySearch has for a particular country, click on the map that
you'll find here.
The list of records is divided into two
sections, transcribed records and untranscribed images. A camera icon indicates
which of the transcribed record sets have images associated with them, but this
doesn't necessarily mean you'll be able to view those images.
Tip: an often overlooked feature of the new FamilySearch site is the
'wiki', which provides information about individual parishes,
often including details of online sources of register transcriptions (follow
this link
to see an example).
Another free site with a large
collection of transcriptions is FreeREG - at the time of writing it has 15
million baptisms, nearly 5 million marriages, and over 10.5 million burials in
its database. However, they're not evenly spread across the country: some
counties are very well catered for (Norfolk in particular), but others less so
- however it's fairly easy to see what is and isn't there. Other volunteer-led
projects include the Online Parish Clerk sites: they don't exist for every
county, but the counties with by far the best coverage are Cornwall,
with over 2.2 million entries last time I checked, and Lancashire with nearly 8 million records.
In the late 19th and early 20th
centuries the contents of some parish registers were published as books, and
your best chance of finding them is through sites such as the Internet Archive,
another free site, where a search for (say) 'Kent parish registers' brings up a
long list of registers that have been printed in book form and digitised for
all to see (you'd pay to see some of these records as subscription sites!).
Another similar site is Google Books - inevitably there is a big
overlap between the two.
A straightforward Google search is
always worth trying, as quite a few individuals have transcribed parish
registers and posted the results on their own websites, and some record offices
have information that you can search free online, for examples Hertfordshire has a range of records
including a marriage index, whilst Medway Archives have posted registers for
their part of Kent online (not transcribed, but at least they are at your
fingertips - and free).
Subscription and pay-per-view sites
An increasing number of parish registers
and/or register entries are becoming available online at Ancestry and Findmypast.
When I first wrote on this topic in February 2010 there were no register images
available at either site, but now you can search Warwickshire, Dorset, Lancashire, West Yorkshire, Liverpool, and most of London at Ancestry, and Cheshire, Devon, Hertfordshire,
Plymouth &
West Devon, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Westminster,
most of East Kent, large parts of Yorkshire, and much of Wales at
Findmypast. Findmypast also has unindexed register images for Lincolnshire.
Tip: many cities and metropolitan
boroughs have a record office which holds the registers for their area, so
that, for example, the Lancashire collection at Ancestry doesn't include
records for every town that was originally part of the county. However Findmypast's
Cheshire collection does include Stockport, and
also Warrington - which is now in Cheshire, but was previously part of
Lancashire.
Both Findmypast and Ancestry have
millions of other parish records in transcription form, although quite a few of
the records in Ancestry's collection have been taken from books which you might
be able to access free online. Durham Records Online
has over 4 million transcribed records from County Durham and Northumberland.
The Joiner Marriage Index has
over 2.5 million marriage records from over 3700 parishes in 31 counties.
Essex
Record Office offer online access to most of their parish
register collection - and whilst the subscription is quite steep at £85 a year
(the cheapest subscription is £5 for one day), for many people with Essex ancestors
it's the most practical solution. I live in Essex, but it would cost me more to
drive to Chelmsford and back than to buy a 24 hour subscription, not least
because of the cost of parking when I get there. On the other hand, a visit to
ERO would allow me to access a wide range of other records which aren't
available online.
Society of Genealogists library
Many of the largest collections of
transcribed records held by the Society of Genealogists are available online to
members: these include Boyd's Marriage Index, which has particularly good
coverage in some of the counties (eg Suffolk and Essex) that are least
well represented in the IGI; for a PDF list of all the online
collections click here. Over 9 million of the records are also
available through Findmypast.
The Society of Genealogists has many
more records in its library, including an amazing collection of records on CD
ROMs and microfiche collected by family history societies and other
organisations. Non-members can use the library on payment of a fee, which
ranges from £5 for 2 hours to £18 for a full day - more details are
available here.
Record offices and archives
When you're within striking distance of
the relevant record office there's no substitute for visiting in person - but
check first what's available online so that you don't waste your time there
looking up records you could just as easily (or perhaps, more easily) have
searched from the comfort of your own home. When I was beginning my research I
wasted a lot of time searching parish registers that had already been indexed
for the IGI - I should, of course, have focused on the unindexed parishes.
Many record offices and archives will
do research on a paid basis - a typical charge is £30 per hour, which sounds a
lot but in my experience is usually money well spent. However independent
researchers usually charge much less, and
some record offices will provide as list (especially if they don't offer a
research service themselves). Please bear in mind that the inclusion of a
researcher on the list is not necessarily an endorsement of that researcher.
The importance of the Register of Banns
One of the key reasons we search for
the marriages of our ancestors is to find out the maiden names of our female
ancestors (of course, if they gave birth after 1837 you'll usually find this
information on the birth certificate). If the couple lived in different parishes,
which was not unusual, they had to decide which one to marry in - and typically
it would be the bride's parish that was chosen. This creates a slight problem,
because we unless she survived until the 1851 Census we won't know where she
was born (and even then, it wouldn't necessarily be the parish where she was
living at the time of her marriage).
Fortunately the banns register often
comes to our rescue. Most people married by banns, rather than by licence, and
if the couple lived in different parishes the banns would necessarily be read
out in both, and so would be recorded in the Banns register for both parishes.
However, there are not nearly as many banns registers available online as
marriage registers - you're more likely to have to have to pay a visit to the
record office.
Success?
When we find the baptism or marriage
that we've been searching for it's such a relief that we often drop our guard,
and forget to assess the information as critically as we should. In the next
article I'm going to talk about some simple things you can do to dramatically
increase the chances that the information in your tree is correct.
How to be accurate -
and why it matters!
You've found someone with the right
name, who was baptised or married at around the right time in the right
geographical area. So is it all right to add them to your tree, or should you
attempt to verify that you've found the right person - and if so, how?
There really is nothing worse in
genealogy than identifying the wrong ancestor, because every step you take from
then on is likely to be wrong. If the person whose baptism or marriage you were
seeking has a common name then you should definitely be on your guard - and in
determining whether a name is common don't judge it by the standards of today,
but by those of the time and locality that you're researching. Many surnames
that have virtually disappeared today were once common in certain localities,
and forenames that even in former times were relatively rare considering at the
country as a whole, could be quite common in some counties.
For example, when you look at the
country as a whole the forenames Roger and Nicholas were fairly rare in the
18th century - but in Devon, where some of my ancestors hail from, they were
quite common.
Remember that if you're relying on
online resources you may only be searching a limited subset of the parishes,
especially if you're searching in the IGI, at FreeREG, or at an OPC site.
You may only have found one or two events that appear to fit the facts - but there
could be many more that haven't been transcribed and indexed. Just because
you've only found one baptism or one marriage that fits doesn't mean that
you've found the only one that fits.
Note: researchers who don't live in
Britain should acquaint themselves with the geography of the area they're
researching; the GENUKI site is a good place to start. If
you live in the US bear in mind that English counties are usually a lot bigger
than the US equivalent - more like a small state - so if you only know the
county where your ancestors came from there could be hundreds of parishes to
search.
What other evidence might you gather to
prove that the person you've found IS indeed your ancestor? And even more
important, how might you prove that he or she ISN'T. The point I'm making is
that we shouldn't simply be looking for confirmation that we've got it right -
we should search just as assiduously for evidence that we've got it wrong.
Sometimes the absence of evidence to the contrary is the best proof available!
The first thing I do is look for more
events that seem to relate to the same family, to try and build up a better
picture. If you've found what you think is your ancestor's baptism, look for
other baptisms where the parents have the same or similar names - remember that
the further you go back the more common spelling variations are, partly because
there was many people were illiterate, but also because for a long time
spelling wasn't considered particularly important.
Note: even William Shakespeare couldn't
make up his mind how to sign his name - and, perhaps surprisingly, not one of
the six surviving signatures in his own hand have that
first 'e'. See Wikipedia for more on this topic.
Sometimes it will gradually become
obvious that there were two families where the parents had exactly the same
names - or were so close that the vicar might easily have confused them.
Usually it will be fairly easy to separate them out based on the timings and
the choice of names - and often other information in the register will help,
such as the abode or occupation of the father. Even if only one family had a
child with the same name as your ancestor it's still important to separate out
the two families, because your next objective will be to find the marriage of
the parents - and you need some way of determining which couple it is who
married.
Simple logic should be your guide. For
example, it is extremely unlikely that there would have been two surviving
children with the same name in the same family; and it would be quite unusual
if one of the sons wasn't named for the father. And if your ancestor was John
Smith and his parents were William and Mary, it's fairly likely that John
wasn't their first son.
If you can work out the years during
which a couple were having children you're half way to working out when they
married and when they were born. I've often seen researchers assume, having
found the baptism of an ancestor, that his or her parents were born about 25
years earlier, but unless you have reason to believe that your ancestor was the
eldest son or daughter it's quite possible that the parents were much older,
perhaps as old as 45.
The names of marriage witnesses often
provide helpful clues, but the burials register is an even more important
source of information. Many researchers have convinced themselves that they've
found the right baptism (and hence the right parents) only to discover many
years later that the child died in infancy.
Even when you are fairly certain you've
identified the right family, don't stop researching other families in the local
area with the same surname - after all there's a reasonable chance that they
are all related to each other.
Linking up with other researchers who
share the same ancestors is a great way to verify that you're on the right
track - provided that you haven't all gone down the same wrong path. Some time ago
I linked up with half a dozen cousins who, though researching independently,
had all made precisely the same mistake - they believed their ancestor was
telling the truth when he gave his father's name on his wedding day.
But that's an exceptional situation -
the chances are it will never happen to you. So my advice is to do everything
you can to find your cousins, short of publishing your family tree online. The
safest and most accurate way to do this is to complete your My
Ancestors page - with just 97,000 members LostCousins certainly doesn't
have the largest membership of all the websites that aim to reunite you with
your living relatives, but we certainly have the most experienced membership
(the average LostCousins member has been researching longer than I have).
Using Family Tree Analyzer to spot
errors
The Family Tree Analyzer program for
Windows was developed by a LostCousins member to perform all sorts of tasks -
indeed, if you set things up in the right way you can even get it to tell you
which relatives you've forgotten to add to your My Ancestors page!
But it can also perform more basic
checks on your tree - for example, Viv in Australia wrote to tell me that FT
Analyzer had picked up a glaring error - one of her ancestors had been shown as
dying before she married!
You can download Family Tree Analyzer
FREE by following this link - it
also has its own area in the LostCousins forum
(you don't need to be a member of the forum to read the discussions).
Checking your My Ancestors entries
When you enter relatives from the
England & Wales censuses on your My
Ancestors page you can click the symbol to carry out a free census reference
search at the Findmypast site. This enables you to verify that you've entered
the census references correctly - it only takes 2 seconds - and that you
haven't made any errors or omissions.
For example, here's the entry from my
page showing my great-grandparents and their family in 1881 - try clicking one
of the grey arrows:
|
1842 |
B M D |
England & Wales 1881 |
8 |
|
||
|
1842 |
B M D |
England & Wales 1881 |
9 |
|
||
|
1866 |
B - - |
England & Wales 1881 |
Blood relative |
|
||
|
1868 |
B M - |
England & Wales 1881 |
Blood relative |
|
||
|
1873 |
B - - |
England & Wales 1881 |
Blood relative |
|
||
|
1875 |
B M - |
England & Wales 1881 |
Blood relative |
|
||
|
1877 |
B M D |
England & Wales 1881 |
4 |
|
||
|
1879 |
B - - |
England & Wales 1881 |
Blood relative |
|
Tip: because the census references for the 1841 and 1881 census apply to
an entire page, with several households, and only the first 20 results are
shown, you may need to look at the next page of results.
You can also use this feature to check
your entries from the Ireland 1911 census, in which case the search will use
the National Archives of Ireland website. I hope to offer searches for other
censuses in due course, but at the moment it isn't technically possible.
Tip: when you're entering relatives from the 1880/81 censuses you should
use the transcription, even when it's wrong, but when you enter relatives from
other censuses it's what the handwritten census shows that matters. This
information is displayed on the Add Ancestor form along with other important
advice.
Online will service still isn't working
perfectly
There are still problems with online
ordering of England & Wales wills from 1858 onwards - as I reported a few
months ago, the emails which tell you that the wills you've ordered are ready
for downloading don't seem to be co-ordinated with the actual availability. In
my case it meant that two of my wills were ready for downloading long before the email arrived, whereas the
third wasn't available until some time after
I received the email. In my case the delay was less than a day, but members
have reported much longer delays, especially over the Christmas period.
To be fair, it is still described as a
beta site - so some glitches are to be expected. But in my opinion the
contractors didn't test the system properly before it went live. Let's hope the
Probate Service haven't paid the bill yet!
Frustrated with Findmypast?
Once I figured out how to use the new
Findmypast site I realised that it was a great improvement on the old site -
but I still get emails from members who are struggling.
Here's my secret: when I search at
Findmypast I search a specific record set, by selecting it from the 'A-Z of
record sets' (ie the last option in the 'Search Records' menu).
It's so easy when you know how!
Reading between the lines
If you're ever tempted to pay money to a
family history website that hasn't been recommended in this newsletter you
might want to stop and ask yourself "If this website is so good, why
hasn't Peter mentioned it?".
Even if a website is free you won't
necessarily find me recommending it - if it isn't obvious who runs a website,
where it is based, and how it is financed I get very suspicious (and so should
you). You also won't find me recommending "link farms", websites
which simply link to other websites and have little or no content of their own.
Warning:
it's very difficult for writers who have a daily genealogy blog to review every
site before they write about it, and as a result some simply republish press
releases they've received. This isn't a criticism of the bloggers themselves -
if I had to produce a daily newsletter I'd have the same problems as they do -
but it is something readers should bear in mind.
Rags to riches - how a laundry maid
became a Viscountess!
Tony sent me this wonderful true story
about his great-great aunt Ellen - if you came across it in a novel you might
think it was ludicrously improbable:
"Ellen Griffiths was a laundry maid, and the
daughter of a gardener. To everyone's surprise, she married a Viscount, the
Right Hon. George Alan Broderick, fifth Viscount Midleton and Baron Broderick
of Midleton, County Cork, where he owned about 30,000 acres, and second Baron
Broderick of Peper Harow, his country estate in England. They were married on
14 May 1833 at St George Hanover Square, when she was just twenty one and he
was twenty six. George succeeded to the peerage in 1836, and assumed the tasks
of managing his vast estates and building and maintaining his homes.
"Several busts of Ellen were commissioned by
George, an indication of how much he felt for her. Their marriage, however,
began to suffer after a dozen years or so. As a result, Ellen left her husband,
and within a couple of years he committed suicide on 1 Nov 1848 by inhaling
fumes from burning charcoal. In the last years, his mental state had
deteriorated to the point that Ellen had written several letters documenting his
erratic and strange behaviour. All this came out at the inquest where it was
discovered that George had admitted privately that it was all
his own fault that his wife had left him.
"The Dowager Viscountess Midleton received an
ample income from the Midleton estate and married Richard Quain F.R.C.S.,
F.R.S. on 25 April 1859. Quain,who was an Irishman,
became Surgeon Extraordinary to Queen Victoria. They had been happily married
for almost thirty years when Ellen died in 1886.
"Ellen had bore no children in either marriage,
but she had adopted one of her nieces, Fanny Griffiths. Most of Ellen's
immediate family felt her benevolence through first class education or help
with employment. Fanny married a farmer, who mistreated her to the point that
she left him. He also eventually committed suicide, this time with dynamite!
This can't be genetic! She brought up her only child who eventually married in
Brighton and had a couple of children.
"When growing up in Ilford, my father we used to
have a full size white marble bust of Ellen, but mother sold it when my father
died. We would really like to find it again, and to make contact with Fanny's
descendants."
Mystery artist identified
In November I explained how when LostCousins
member John Makin and his wife Alice discovered a sketchbook dating from the
first half of the 20th century thery decided to try to identify the artist. The
first sketches dated from 1925, and had been made on the voyage of the Balmoral Castle to
South Africa in December of that year - so John and Alice started with a list
of the 225 passengers on that ship.
Now the mystery has been solved! If you
read their blog
describing the search you can get a feeling for just what it was like as they
closed in on the anonymous artist.
Note: so that they could share their voyage of discovery with other
researchers they published a little book featuring the sketches (you can get it
through Amazon or direct from John's website).
Birthday Book puzzle solved?
The quest that John and Alice embarked
upon reminded me of the challenge
I set readers of this newsletter at Christmas 2012. I had come across a
Birthday Book amongst a box of books that I'd bought around 10 years previously
at an auction of 'household effects' in Great Dunmow, Essex - and the challenge
was to see whether we could identify the owner(s) of the book.
As an experiment I set up a wiki where
those of us taking part could post information and exchange ideas. If you want
to take a look you'll need a user name and password - the user name is
'lostcousins', and you'll find the password right at the bottom of your My Summary page.
By the spring of 2013 we had identified
the last owner of the book as Christine M Coleman, born in 1914, but we
couldn't get any further - so I was amazed (and delighted) this week when out
of the blue I received an email from a new LostCousins member, Clare in Canada,
who is her niece! I hope that in the coming weeks and months we may be able to
piece together more of the story.
It's not often that I review a work of
fiction that isn't about genealogy, but I enjoyed A
Suitable Young Man so much that I just had to tell you about it. The
author of this extremely enjoyable book is Anne L Harvey - who many of you will
know from her articles in family history magazines - and the story takes place in
1956, against the background of National Service and the Suez Crisis.
I'm not familiar with the area of
Lancashire where it's set, and I was only 6 years old at the time, but I'm glad
to say that this didn't spoil my enjoyment in the slightest - the people and
locations seemed so real that I thought at first that it must be
semi-autobiographical. Judging from the effusive email I received from a
LostCousins member both the period detail and the geography are spot on - this
is what Val wrote:
"I am only half way through but can tell now that
it will be the best book I have ever read. I can see Rivington Pike from my
kitchen window and my daily walks take me 'up Rivington' or to Horwich.
"In reading the book I am reliving my youth,
everywhere the characters go I also went, and the last train on a Saturday
night out of Blackpool was spot on. It used to be an exciting/frightening ride
home where the lads did take the light bulbs out and throw them out of the
windows. Fortunately I was with my own Teddy Boy
boyfriend so felt safe enough. Like Kathy my parents did not like my Teddy Boy but we rode out all the rough seas and later married.
"We had 55 years together but he sadly passed
away last year, so this book is evoking some extra special memories for me. I
have to keep putting the book down because I don't want it to end….."
I didn't want the book to end either -
so I was absolutely delighted to discover that Anne has another novel in the
pipeline. A Suitable Young Man is a
skilful recreation of Britain in the mid-1950s which reminded me what it was
like to be young - and whilst some people might pigeonhole the novel as
romantic fiction, so was Pride &
Prejudice. Mind you, there is one big difference between Jane Austen and
Anne L Harvey - Jane Austen wasn't a LostCousins member!
You can buy A Suitable Young Man
from Amazon.co.uk,
Amazon.com,
Amazon.ca,
and Amazon.com.au
(note: if you use these links LostCousins may benefit even if you end up buying
something completely different).
Genealogy in the Sunshine - more places released
I started the New Year in the best
possible way - with a leisurely game of tennis in the sunshine, followed by a
swim in a lovely warm pool and a spot of sunbathing!
You're right - I wasn't in England,
though I was in Europe and not the Tropics. For the very first time my wife and
I spent New Year away, at the Rocha Brava resort on Portugal's Algarve coast
where Genealogy in the Sunshine will
take place in March.
By choosing our dates carefully we kept
the cost of flights down to £100 each (return), so it was a really cheap
holiday in the sun - and I even got a suntan. The timing was great - sunshine
and blue skies every day - and we were among the first to swim in the resort's
new covered and heated pool, where the water temperature hovered around 28
degrees.
In March the weather should be even warmer
- January is the coldest month on the Algarve, with daytime temperatures comparable
to England in May. But going over for New Year was well worthwhile - because I
managed to persuade the resort to make available some additional apartments for
the course in March. So if you are interested, please take a look at the website I've set
up - and get in touch with me right away!
This is where I'll post any last minute
additions.
In my next newsletter I'm going to
provide some advice on knocking down 'brick walls' - a perpetual problem for
family historians like you and me!
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2015 Peter Calver
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