Newsletter
- 22 August 2013
LostCousins
is totally FREE for the holiday weekend
Staying
in touch with your cousins
Family Tree Analyzer works wonders
The
mystery of the missing inventor
Millions
of school records coming to findmypast
Save
10% at findmypast.co.uk ENDS SOON
Good
news and bad news at Ancestry
County
Archives Record Network
More
information about the 1921 Census of Canada
The LostCousins newsletter is
usually published fortnightly. To access the previous newsletter (dated 8
August 2013) click here, for an index to articles
from 2009-10 click here, for
a list of articles from 2011 click here and for a
list of articles from 2012-13 click here.
Whenever possible links are
included to the websites or articles mentioned in the newsletter (they are
highlighted in blue or purple and underlined,
so you can't miss them).For your convenience, when you click on a link a new
browser window or tab will open (so that you don’t lose your place in the
newsletter) - if nothing seems to happen then you need to enable pop-ups in
your browser or change the settings In your security software.
To go to the main LostCousins
website click the logo at the top of this newsletter. If you're not already a
member, do join - it's FREE, and you'll get an email to alert you whenever
there's a new edition of this newsletter available!
LostCousins is
totally FREE for the holiday weekend
It's wet and rainy outside - what better
time to catch up on your research? But every cloud has a silver lining, and until
Tuesday 27th August the LostCousins website will be totally free, which means
you'll be able to contact the new cousins you find - whether you're a subscriber
or not.
Here's how to take advantage of this
opportunity in five easy steps:
(1) Check your My
Cousins page - is there anyone waiting in the New Contacts section? If so, click Reply or Make Contact
(you don't have to write an email - it's all done for you).
(2) Go to your My
Ancestors page and click the Search
button. Whilst you may not have added any new entries since you last clicked
the button, your cousins might well have done.
(3) Make sure that you've entered ancestors from every
line - if you've been a member for some time it's quite likely you've made some
new discoveries since you last added any entries. Focus on the 1881 Census -
that's the one that your cousins are most likely to have used.
(4) Now check your My
Summary page - how does the number of blood
relatives compare with the number direct
ancestors? If the ratio is less than 10 to 1 it suggests that you've
focused more on your direct ancestors than on the members of their extended
families.
(5) Watch your Match
Potential increase as you enter more relatives; notice that it goes up much
more quickly when you enter relatives from 1881. Remember to click the Search button from time to time to check
for new matches.
Staying in touch with
your cousins
Once you've made contact with a relative
through LostCousins you can continue to correspond with them through the site,
even after the offer has ended (or your subscription has expired). This is
immensely useful because Ancestry and some other sites force you to take out a
subscription when you want to contact another member, even someone you've
corresponded with in the past.
Even if you meet your cousins through
another site, link to them through LostCousins as well. So often we lose touch
with the cousins we've found - don't let that happen to you!
Tip:
when you invite a cousin to join using the Refer a Relative option on your My
Referrals page you'll be linked to them automatically when they register using
the unique referral code. You don't need to know their email address - just
leave the email box blank (use the messaging system at Ancestry, Genes
Reunited, or wherever to send them the referral code).
Family Tree Analyzer works wonders
When you read my last newsletter did you
download the Family Tree Analyzer program to check how many boys and girls were
born to fathers over 55 in your tree? The latest version is even easier to
download and install - just click here,
press the Download button, and run
the installer file that you've downloaded - it will install the program
automatically.
Of course, this remarkable free program
wasn't written just to tell you about the children born to older fathers - this
is only one of the many things you can do with it.
For example, if you click on the Census tab the program will list all the
people in your tree who were alive at the time of a particular census - simply
double-click one of them to carry out an instant census search at Ancestry,
findmypast, or FamilySearch (choose the census provider from the dropdown menu
at the top of the list).
Since the 1881 Census transcription is
free at all of those sites (though you may need to log-in at Ancestry or
findmypast), it's a quick and easy way to find more records to add to your My Ancestors page!
Note:
I'm still collecting data on the births of children to older men, so please
send me the results from your tree whether they show more boys, more girls, or
a perfect split. It's important that you don't withhold results simply because
they don't seem interesting, or don't support the research that I recently
reported - otherwise my sample will be biased.
The mystery of the
missing inventor
Every year there are thousands of people
who go missing in the UK, but a story on the BBC website
caught my eye. It focused on the late 19th century disappearance of an inventor
by the name of William Cantelo, who claimed to have
invented the machine gun. I wonder if there are any clues in census or other
records that wouldn't have been accessible at the time?
It's all too easy to focus in on a
specific problem and forget how important it is to look around the problem,
gathering evidence that can provide clues and inferences. For example, you may
recall that last year I set a challenge, which was to find a birth registration
- but to solve the problem you had to research around it.
In that case the answer was to look for
the birth registrations of the brothers and sisters. If you'd done so you would
have discovered that none of them had been registered - or rather that none of
them had been registered under the surname you would have expected, that of the
father.
When our thinking is blinkered we
unerringly head in the same direction, even if it means bashing our head
against a 'brick wall' (which it often does). But when we think laterally we
have a chance to make discoveries that we'd otherwise have missed, not because
we weren't trying hard enough, but because we were trying too hard.
In the next article you'll see an
example of how widening our outlook can lead to new and unexpected discoveries
that shed new light on the problem in hand.
The latest edition of Who Do You Think You Are? magazine (September 2013) features
a letter from a reader who wrote in about the missing marriage of her great
grandparents, Charles Millington and Mary Ann (or Jane) Cook.
In the Banns register of Walworth All
Saints, Southwark it is recorded that the banns were called on 13th, 20th, and
27th October 1895 (you can see these entries in the London
Metropolitan Archives collection at Ancestry).
However, there is no corresponding entry in the marriage register, even though
in the 1911 Census it is stated that they had been married for 15 years.
Rebecca Probert,
author of the excellent Marriage
Law for Genealogists, was the expert called upon by the magazine to
shed light on this mystery. She highlighted three possibilities: one is that
the marriage never took place, the second is that the marriage took place, but
the record was lost, and final possibility - the one that she appears to
consider most likely - is that the marriage was never recorded.
Note:
you can hear Professor Probert talk about marriage
and genealogy at the Society of Genealogists on Saturday 21st September - for
more information about this and other events at the SoG click here.
One of the many interesting facts in
Professor Probert's book is that a marriage can still
be valid, even if it is not registered - and in this case all the evidence
suggests that the marriage did take place. Or does it?
When searching for a missing marriage I
always make sure that I can find the birth registrations of the children -
because if the birth of the eldest child isn't indexed under the father's
surname, this is a strong indication that the couple weren't married at that
time. The eldest child, Mary Ann, is shown as 4 years old in 1901 and 14 years
old in 1911, which suggests that she was born between April 1896 and March
1897.
However, there is no birth registration
for a Mary or Mary Ann Millington in the London area during this period, which
is a bit worrying, since the registration of births had been compulsory for 20
years. Even more worryingly, there is a Mary Ann Cook whose birth was
registered in Lambeth in the 2nd quarter of 1896, although she could have been
the child of James & Mary Ann Cook who was baptised in Brixton on 17th
April.
It certainly seems a bit too much of a
coincidence that both the marriage and the birth registration are missing -
what do you think?
Note:
I couldn't find Mary's baptism either, nor was she included in the London
School Admissions Registers at Ancestry, which I've found can be an
incredible useful source of information, even though the coverage is somewhat
patchy.
Millions of school
records coming to findmypast
As I was writing this newsletter, BrightSolid, - the parent company of findmypast - announced
a major project to involving a consortium of archives in England & Wales
which will make millions (quite possibly tens of millions - but that's my
estimate, not theirs) of school records available online at findmypast.co.uk
The registers being digitised are for
the period from 1870-1914 and cover every region of England & Wales, but unfortunately
there is no indication of when the records might start to become available
online.
Save 10% at
findmypast.co.uk ENDS SOON
The exclusive discount code that can save
you 10% on any new findmypast.co.uk subscription expires at the end of August.
See the last
issue for full details of the offer, and to find out how you can get both a
free LostCousins subscription and an invitation to join the LostCousins
forum ahead of the official launch (that's something that money can't buy).
The Edinburgh-based company
Beneficiaries Ltd (now World Wide Genealogy Ltd) has been ordered to pay
£213,096.98 to the heirs of Charlotte Cook, who died in a rest home aged 93
years without leaving a will. The judge at Reading Crown Court described the
ten offences as "calculated, cynical and well planned frauds."
You can read more about that case here, on the
website of West Berkshire Council - who brought the case after a complaint to their
Trading Standards department. Could you spot a fraudulent heir hunter? Take a
look at the home pages of these websites - one of them is completely fraudulent:
There's another way to defraud beneficiaries
- cut them out of the equation altogether. In 2009 two men were found guilty of
conspiracy to defraud and conspiracy to forge in a case that involved over £2m
and 14 deceased estates. Instead of contacting potential beneficiaries they forged
signatures and invented witnesses in an attempt to acquire properties owned by
the people who had died. This case is described here
on the Metropolitan Police website.
Tip:
at the beginning of last year I wrote two articles about heir
hunters, which you'll find here and here.
Good news and bad news
at Ancestry
After 7 years Ancestry have at last corrected the 72,888 entries in the 1881 Census
where the parish was incorrectly spelled as Harmmersmith
rather than Hammersmith. This particular error featured several times in this
newsletter, partly because of its longevity, partly because I was the one who
first reported it, but mainly because of the delicious irony that Ancestry's
offices are based in Hammersmith.
The bad news is that there are some
strange transcription errors in Ancestry's 1911 Census (which is free to access
until 14th October - click here
to find out more). Raymond discovered that there are thousands of people who
are wrongly shown as having been born in Esh, a name that
was new to me - but turns out to be a parish a few miles from Durham.
If you search Ancestry's 1911 England
census for people who were born in Esh you'll get
8363 results, but only a quarter are for people who were born in Esh, Durham - the others are for people who were born in
non-existent parishes such as Esh in Cheshire, Esh in Fife, and Esh in Pembrokeshire.
It's not as if the transcribers have misread the name
of the town or parish - there's no way you could misread "Birkenhead"
or "Aberdour" as "Esh".
I should point out that you'll only find
these incorrect results if you use Ancestry's Old Search - which makes me wonder whether the real reason Ancestry want to do away
with the Old Search is to prevent us spotting their errors? Sure, if you use
the New Search you won't find the 6000 incorrect entries, but that doesn't mean
they don't exist - the mistakes are still there, it's just that the New Search isn't
smart enough to find them!
Have you
found similar issues with Ancestry's 1911 Census? I'm not talking about the
occasional mistranscription (because these are a fact
of life) but the sort of errors that indicate a systematic failure of some
kind. Get in touch if you've
Note:
you may find, as I did, that if you search the 1911 Census at Ancestry you're
switched to the New Search automatically. If this happens to you, go back to
the Ancestry home page and choose Search All Records from the dropdown menu,
then click the 'Go To Old Search' link in the top
right-hand corner.
As I watched actress Lesley Sharp going into
the storeroom at the Essex Record Office in Who
Do You Think You Are? I couldn't help thinking how unlikely it was that I'd
ever have that opportunity.
Wrong! Just days later I discovered that
Essex Record Office will be celebrating 75 years of preserving the county's
past by holding an Open Day on 14th September - which will include behind the
scenes tours.
For more details see the ERO blog.
County Archives Record
Network
Essex Record Office is just one of over
60 members of the County
Archives Record Network. The participating archives provide free Reader's
tickets to researchers who bring appropriate proof of identity, and once issued
the CARN ticket is valid at any of the archives in the network. Follow the link
above for a list of participating archives and more details of the scheme.
More information
about the 1921 Census of Canada
Last issue I reported that images of the
census schedules had gone online at Ancestry, although they haven't been
transcribed and indexed yet. More details have now become available thanks to a
conversation between the president of the Ontario Genealogical Society and a
senior representative of Library & Archives Canada - you can read it here.
Tip:
the census images can be viewed free at Ancestry.ca but not at other
Ancestry sites around the world.
71,000 pages from 200 Canadian
directories and books of military, religious, occupational, and other records
have gone online at findmypast.co.uk as part of the World Collection. You'll
find more details here.
Tony contacted me recently to tell me
about an entry he'd found on the 1851 Census where the relationship of two
members of the household to the head was shown as 'love child', a remarkably frank
disclosure (HO107/1731/231/8) for those days, albeit a kinder description than
you might see in a baptism register.
An even more unusual entry was spotted
by the dogged researchers at findmypast - just take a look at this!
Mark Twain didn't quite get to read his
own obituary, despite saying "the report of my death was an exaggeration"
because in fact the New York Herald
article said that he was gravely ill, and not that he had died. But Dave Swarbrick, the folk violinist who used to belong to
Fairport Convention (and who is still alive and well) did get to read the
obituary erroneously published by the Daily
Telegraph in 1999 (you can read what they wrote here).
However, Harry Weathersby
Stamps who died in March this year went one better - he wrote his own obituary,
leaving only a blank for the date to be inserted! If you're tempted to do the
same, why not take a look at what Harry wrote?
He certainly sounds like quite a character!
By the way, everyone knows that Spike
Milligan, the comedian, wrote the inscription for his gravestone "I told
you I was ill" - but I'd quite forgotten that the Chichester diocese didn't
allow it to be used until it was translated into Gaelic (see this BBC article
from 2004).
The National Maritime Museum at
Greenwich has a special area on its website
for memorials to seafarers and other victims of maritime disasters - there are
over 5000 memorials recorded. You can browse the memorials by category, or
search on a variety of fields including surname - although unfortunately the
search isn't working at the moment (I have reported it to their press office).
Amongst the many memorials listed is a
plaque commemorating Captain George William Manby,
who invented the Manby Mortar, which allowed a line
to be propelled to a ship in distress. It was suggested after his death that as
many as 1000 people had been saved by the device - at findmypast
you can see this assertion in the report of a meeting of the National Life Boat
Institution published in the London Daily
News on 8th December 1854.
Captain Manby
lived at Woodhall in Hilgay,
Norfolk and it is in All Saints Church that the memorial can be found.
Underneath the inscription is written "The public should have paid this
tribute" - an interesting comment, don't you think?
At the moment I'm reading two books
related to family history: Family
Matters - a History of Genealogy by Michael Sharpe, and Aprons
and Silver Spoons by Mollie Moran.
The first is full of interesting facts
and figures - the origin of the word pedigree, the 35,000 enumerators recruited
for the 1841 Census, the way in which early genealogists distorted the truth to
suit the client; the latter is a real life Downton
Abbey based on the below-stairs reminiscences of Mollie Moran, who became a
skivvy at the age of 14, and published her book at the age of 96.
Mollie's employer had two big houses:
his London home was in Cadogan Square, near
Knightsbridge, but his country seat was at Woodhall, the
estate that was once owned by Captain Manby (see the
previous article). There were 14 servants looking after 2 people - those were
the days!
The last book I finished had nothing to do with
genealogy - it was The
Wizard: the Life of Stanley Matthews, by Jon Henderson. Stanley
Matthews was a hero of mine from the moment I read his autobiography, The
Stanley Matthews Story, at the age of 9 or 10.
Many years later I had the privilege of spending
a few hours with Sir Stanley, as he was by then, and discovering that as well
as a wonderful footballer he was a great storyteller - and one of the nicest
people I've ever met. Take a look at this short film at the
British Pathé website which focuses on some of the highlights of Matthews' long
career - or listen to this episode
from the Football Legends series, broadcast in 1995.
Have you noticed that as prices of goods
in the shops get ever higher the discounts available to canny shoppers are also
increasing? However discounts aren't always what they seem - Tesco were fined
£300,000 this week for misleading customers in connection with an offer of
supposedly half-price strawberries.
It serves them right! I've written in
the past about the way they sometimes increase prices only to discount them
again - and there are plenty of products that I'll only buy when they are on special offer.
Take wine, for example - there's a
perfectly drinkable brand of Chilean wines that they sell under the Isla Negra label. In fact, I used to buy them myself a few years
ago when they were on offer at £2.99, reduced from £3.99. But nowadays the
standard price isn't £3.99, £4.99 or even £6.99 - they're £9.99 a bottle on the
Tesco
Wine website.
However, when there's a special offer
you might find the same bottles selling for £4.99, which is a much more
realistic price for this pleasant but unexceptional wine. I notice that Asda
are currently selling the Isla Negra Cabernet
Sauvignon Merlot blend (which isn't available from Tesco) for £4, reduced from
£6.
Reprehensible as the marketing tactics of big
companies might be, they don't quite match some of the scams you'll come across
on the Internet. For example, type melissa johnson
working from home into Google and you'll
find out how you can make up to $8000 a month. And doesn't she look like someone
you can trust, especially holding her cute little baby?
But wait a minute,
is that really a picture of "Melissa Johnson from London"? Because she looks remarkably similar to "Melissa Johnson from
Dublin", "Melissa Johnson from Sydney", and even "Melissa
Johnson from Paraparaumu". They're all
supposedly making a fortune working from home.....
At least if we feel we've been conned by
a major retailer we've got a chance of recovering our money, but I doubt that
anyone who got fooled by Melissa Johnson ever got a penny back.
I should point out at this stage that
the lady in the photograph is probably perfectly innocent - after all, what con
artist would be so stupid as to post their own photo on the Internet? Similarly,
I imagine that the people in the photos on the website of the scam heir hunter
(see article above) are just models - they're almost certainly library photos that
anyone can license. But don't they look convincing!
This where any late
updates will be posted, so it's worth checking back after a few days.
I hope you've found this newsletter
interesting - but most of all I hope you manage to find some new cousins this
weekend!
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2013 Peter Calver
You
MAY link to this newsletter or email a link to your friends and relatives
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DO NOT re-publish any part of this newsletter, other
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are often updated.