Newsletter
- 21st August 2014
FREE THIS
WEEKEND: Ancestry & LostCousins
£1 offer
continues at findmypast ENDS 31ST AUGUST
Do
you have Scottish ancestors?
'Equality'
decision makes mockery of the GRO
Royal
Marines marriage registers go online
Gretna
Green still attracting lovers
Neanderthals
DID get on with humans after all
British
Newspaper Archive offer 40% off ENDS TUESDAY
Summer
savings on genealogy magazines ENDING SOON
Is
Britain a Christian country?
The LostCousins newsletter is
usually published fortnightly. To access the previous newsletter (dated 11th
August) 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!
FREE THIS WEEKEND: Ancestry
& LostCousins
This weekend both Ancestry.co.uk
and LostCousins will be free - so it's a
great opportunity to research your collateral lines and add extra relatives to
your My Ancestors page so that you
can connect with other researchers who are your 'lost cousins'. The Ancestry
offer runs from Saturday to Monday, but the LostCousins offer starts now and
runs right through until Tuesday!
Normally you'd need to be a LostCousins
subscriber to contact someone new (ie someone in the New Contacts section of your My Ancestors page), but until midnight
on Tuesday all members can contact people they've been matched with.
Tip:
you don't need to get a reply before the offer ends - just make sure you click
the Make Contact button while the offer is still running. And unlike many other
sites, once you've made contact with someone at LostCousins you can continue to
correspond with them whether or not you're a subscriber.
To make the most of this opportunity use
Ancestry.co.uk over the weekend to identify your direct ancestors' extended
families. I generally start from the 1841 Census and trace my ancestors'
brothers, sisters, and cousins as they marry then have children and eventually
grandchildren. For every relative recorded on the 1841 Census you're typically
going to find 5 to 10 relatives in 1881 - but it can be more, because in the
second half of the 19th century infant mortality was starting to fall.
You might think - what's the point of
entering such distant relatives? But the fact is they're not really that
distant - someone who shares your great-great grandparents is a 3rd cousin of
yours; someone who shares your great-great-great grandparents is a 4th cousin.
These are the most valuable cousins to find - sufficiently distant that you're
unlikely to know of them, but sufficiently close that they share a significant
chunk of your tree.
Tip:
a great way to identify the relatives you can enter at LostCousins is to use the
free Family Tree Analyzer
program for Windows written by a talented LostCousins member. You can download it here.
£1 offer continues at
findmypast ENDS 31ST AUGUST
You can still get a one month
subscription for a bargain price - see this article in
the last newsletter for more details.
Tip:
if you're still struggling with the new findmypast site it's almost certainly
because you haven't read these articles in April
and July.
Do you have Scottish
ancestors?
Right now there are only two websites
that give the census references for the 1881 Scottish census, essential when
you want to enter relatives from this census on your My Ancestors page.
Scotlandspeople is the official
site, with more Scottish records than any other - many of which you won't find
anywhere else. However it's pay-per-view only, which
makes it an expensive way of collecting census information. It's also a little
difficult to interpret the census references displayed (though you'll find a
guide here on the
LostCousins FAQs page).
But at Ancestry
you can get the information free this weekend. There's only one thing to watch
out for - the census references are somewhat scattered - you'll find the
Enumeration district (ED) and page number in the Source citation, but the Registration number is only shown as part
of the main transcription.
'Equality' decision
makes mockery of the GRO
This week the Prime Minister announced
that mothers' names will be added to marriage certificates following questions
in Parliament, and a campaign on the petition site Change.org (definitely NOT a
site that I would recommend to LostCousins members, I'm afraid, because like many
tabloid newspapers it only presents one side of a story - and whilst comments
are permitted you can only comment if you support the petition).
Ironically a petition which made exactly
the same proposal on the Government's official e-petitions site had collected
only 175 signatures by the time it closed in 2013. By contrast, Guy Etchell's petition
to open the historic BMD registers to family historians has gained over 6,334
signatures (most of them from LostCousins members), over 36 times as many,
though still not sufficient to prompt a debate in Parliament. If you haven't
yet signed Guy's petition you can do so here. You'll need to
be either a British citizen or a UK resident - however, you don't need to be a
LostCousins member or even a family historian, so why not persuade your friends
and family to sign?
Despite the sterling actions of my MP,
Sir Alan Haselhurst, and other MPs who have written
letters on behalf of LostCousins members, we still haven't achieved what we
want - perhaps because it isn't perceived as an 'equality'
issue, so hasn't attracted the attention of the PM.
Perhaps we should be pressing our
argument on the grounds of racial equality? For virtually a decade family
historians with Scottish ancestry have been able to view register entries
online, whilst those of us with English or Welsh ancestors have had to put up
with a system that was introduced three days before the world's first trunk
railway line opened between Birmingham and Warrington. So
much for progress.
Ironically, when civil registration was
introduced in Scotland in 1855 (that's 159 years ago) mothers' names were on
marriage certificates from day one!
Royal Marines marriage
registers go online
We might not be able to view the GRO's
registers online, but the marriage registers for the Royal Marines can now be
viewed at findmypast.
Covering the period 1813-1920, the beautiful colour scans contain over 18,000
records which you can search here.
Gretna Green still
attracting lovers
It is estimated that 5,000 marriages a
year take place in the small Scottish village of Gretna Green, close to the
English border, even though the population of the village is only 2,700 (for
comparison, there are only about 3,000 marriages a year in the neighbouring
county of Cumbria, which has a population of around half a million)!
At one time couples from England and
Wales would elope to Gretna Green to marry without their parents' permission,
but the numbers fell sharply in 1977 when the age of consent was lowered to 18
(although at 16, it's still lower in Scotland).
You can read more about Gretna Green,
past and present, in this BBC article.
My father married twice, his father
married twice; my mother's father married twice, his father also married twice
- but in each case their first wife died tragically young, so it was all above
board - except, perhaps, in the case of my great-grandfather, who married his
dead wife's sister 10 years before this was legalised in 1907.
Reading the autobiography
of the actor David Tomlinson, best known - to me at least - for his role as
George Banks in Mary
Poppins, I discovered that he too remarried after his first wife died.
In contrast his outwardly respectable solicitor father Clarence had two wives in parallel, living with one family in
the week and the other at the weekend. Technically it wasn't bigamy, because he
only married one of them, but it must have been just as complicated for him to
manage - especially since he had 4 children by his wife and (according to the
autobiography) 7 by his mistress 2 of whom were born before Clarence married,
and 5 afterwards.
Note:
there is a public tree at Ancestry which tells a slightly different tale -
maybe somebody reading this knows which version is correct?
The double life of Clarence Tomlinson
only became apparent when one of his sons, riding on a bus to Heathrow Airport,
spotted his father sitting up in bed in a strange house, drinking a cup of tea.
I wonder how many dark secrets have only been uncovered generations later by
family historians like you and me?
Against all advice Clarence Tomlinson
continued to drive until he was 93, despite writing off three cars including
two Jaguars. He finally gave up only when he was prosecuted for driving without
a licence, his GP having refused to certify that he was fit to drive.
But he seems to have been an exception
amongst older drivers - in the UK there are 200 people aged 100 or over who still
have driving licences, and some of them featured in a recent ITV documentary (available
on itvplayer here). It's
amazing how some people don't age as quickly as others - didn't I read somewhere
that researching your family tree helps to stave off dementia, or is that just
wishful thinking?
Fortunately by the time I'm 100 it will
be irrelevant - cars will be driving themselves, and the concept of self-drive
cars will probably seem as outdated then as the penny-farthing is now. Or the
GRO, for that matter!
Neanderthals DID
get on with humans after all
I may not get on with the GRO, but it
seems our ancestors were better at getting on with Neanderthals: according to
the latest research Neanderthals and modern humans living in Europe may have
exchanged ideas and culture 40,000 years ago. Indeed, it seems that humans and
Neanderthals could have co-existed in Europe for as long as 5,000 years, which
is ten times as long as some previous estimates. You can find out more in this article
on the National History Museum website.
The evidence suggests that Neanderthals
in Europe died out around 39,000 years ago, probably because of climate change
which resulted in colder and drier weather. Most present-day humans have about
2% Neanderthal genes, and some also carry genes from another early subspecies,
the Denisovans.
Some DNA tests will indicate the
proportion of Neanderthal and Denisovan genes, but I
suspect that because research in this field is so fast-moving, we might get
very different answers in a few years' time.
I recently emailed thousands of readers
of this newsletter who have yet to enter any
relatives on their My Ancestors page,
even though some of them had been members for 7 or 8 years. Those of you who have completed your My Ancestors page and connected with cousins you didn't know you
had will probably be amazed that anyone would fail to take advantage of the
uniquely accurate and safe system that LostCousins offers!
In the circumstances I thought it would
be useful to list some of the common misconceptions in the hope that some of
you reading this will take note and put matters right:
British Newspaper Archive
offer 40% off ENDS TUESDAY
Until Tuesday 26th August you can save
40% on an Annual subscription to the British Newspaper Archive, which offers 12
months of unlimited access to over 8.5 million pages from historic newspapers
with - by my estimate - over 100 million articles.
The Advanced Search allows you to search
specific newspapers or locations, to restrict your search to a period you
choose, and to INCLUDE or EXCLUDE certain words. This last feature is very
handy if you're looking for surnames that are also place names - for example,
when searching for my Wells ancestors I can exclude mentions of Tunbridge
Wells. I'd encourage you to try some free searches before making up your mind
one way or the other.
To take advantage of this offer click here
and enter the code WW1OFFER, which
will bring the price down from almost £80 to £47.97
It's very difficult to select letters
from the many wonderful submissions, but this one from Barbara to her
great-great uncle is just that little bit different:
Dear
Great-Great Uncle Robert,
Who would
ever have believed that I would be writing to you today.
I must tell you that I do so with very mixed emotions and no doubt you could be
receiving this in the same frame of mind!! I am delighted to have 'found' you
and wish I had known my grandfather as he would surely have been able to regale
me with information and memories of you his Uncle. It has only been thanks to
all the dedicated transcribers of records that I am now able to send this
letter.
From the
records that I have viewed I can see that you could break the rules sometimes
and as their only living son I bet you caused your parents a few sleepless
nights especially your Mother, who never saw her other
'boys' live for very long.
You and I
also have different kind of link and as far as I know it is exclusive to us.
Eczema, I am told, is genetic. When I had a severe bout of it the origins were
unknown, no one anywhere in the family suffered from it, then I found you and
the link was there. We even both had attacks when in a foreign country! How
uncanny is that?
My great
sadness is that your life was cut so short, that you died without anyone
knowing where and I wondered if anyone was able to even visit the memorial to
see your name carved in memory of you and all you sacrificed for this country
and the possibility of my existence. Dear Uncle Robert, it is with you in mind
that I will be setting a light in my window on 4th of August at 10 pm, as many
others will be doing for the memory of their loved ones.
I have also
planned a trip to the area of your last known position before you were reported
'missing presumed dead' how your Mother and Father must have grieved their
loss, the one son to survive in life. I will leave flowers and a blessing for
you, a memory sent from your Mother and a thank you from me for all you gave
this country and our family.
I hope this
letter reaches you and that one day I might hear from you in return, in joy and
sadness in equal measure,
With love
from the future,
Your
great-great niece,
Barbara
WW1 PoW records: follow-up
The news about the Red Cross records
came through just as I was finalising the last newsletter, so I didn't have an
opportunity to research them thoroughly.
Fortunately there are a number of people
who read this newsletter who know a lot more than I do about military records,
and I received this very helpful email from the author, researcher, and speaker
Simon Fowler - who worked at the National Archives for nearly 30 years, and did
a PhD on charities and the First World War:
"Excellent
newsletter as always.
"However I think you
are a little harsh about the ICRC material. They are actually quite informative
but not in the way the ICRC probably intended. For POWs they list the camps
they were in: information which is not possible to obtain from other
sources. There are also Red Cross
reports on the camps themselves, but only in French or German. However the really
important records relate to men missing in action, because the British Army
sent Geneva details of men who were reported as being missing. The vast
majority of whom have no known grave (and are
commemorated on the Menin Gate, Tyne Cot and Thiepval memorials). The ICRC cards contain details of many
of these soldiers, together with details of the units
they served in, including the company they were with, which can make it easy to
work exactly why and when they went missing in the war diaries."
Simon Fowler's book Tracing
your First World War Ancestors might be of interest to some of you, although
because it was published over a year ago it's inevitably not bang up to date
with what's online - that's always going to be a problem with printed books.
I also received some valuable feedback
from Alan, whose father-in-law was a PoW
in WW1. He provided these two useful links for help on searching, then reading and understanding
the cards: ICRC,
The Long Long Trail. He also followed up with some tips based on
his own experience:
"The more information
about the individual the better e.g. Full name, place of birth, regimental
number, regiment served with, home address and likely next of kin the better as
some or all of this is contained in the PA series of PoW camp records. The thing to remember is do not be
dismayed if it is not possible to find anything initially as some surnames have
been grouped into regiments, if not found here look under the name only or
other regiments.
"Tip: if a search
suggests (say 65) records they are NOT all the records of that name just the
ones that have not been allocated to a regiment. Look at all records under that
name - I found a record for my father-in-law under a different first name, all
other details were the same. This was an error by the German PoW camp list compiler.
"A translation of PA
series headers (first page of camp list) can be found here;
I have many questions that I am still researching, e.g. why are there 3 dates
entered on a camp list header page and what do they mean?"
Findmypast have launched a Hall
of Heroes and will be making a £10 donation to the British Red Cross for
each story they publish.
A lot of members have recently missed
out on opportunities (or come close to doing so) because they have an extension
for their browser which is designed to block adverts. Such programs stop many
of the links in my newsletter from working - for example, one blocks links to
findmypast and Genes Reunited.
These programs were useful many years
ago, but these days online advertising is not as intrusive as it once was -
provided you visit the right sort of sites. Indeed if you visit the wrong sort
of sites adverts are the least of your worries - you need to worry about
viruses, Trojans, and other malware.
My advice is not to use browser
extensions unless they're absolutely essential - which most aren't.
Summer savings on genealogy
magazines
Under 3rd September you can save an
extra 30% on subscriptions to Your Family
Tree and dozens of other Future magazines when you click here
- this brings the price down to as little as £2.32 an issue, compared to the
cover price of £5.25
Or get 5 issues of Who Do You Think You Are? magazine or many
others, including Radio Times and Gardener's World for just £5 when you
click here.
This bargain offer only lasts until the end of the August and seems to be for
UK addresses only.
Is Britain a Christian
country?
As family historians we rely on the fact
that most of our ancestors were baptised, married in church, and buried in the
parish graveyard. But whilst the General Register Office still lives in the
19th century the rest of the country has changed, so much so that it has been forecast that by 2020 less
than 5% of the population will attend church regularly.
Not long ago David Cameron, the British
Prime Minister, was criticised by many and derided by others for describing
Britain as a Christian country. But don't be fooled by the statistics that
demonstrate how few of us go to church on a regular basis - that surely isn't
what it's about? Surely what we're really talking about is Christian values
(most of which are found in all religions).
The fact is,
there are few countries in the world that espouse Christian values as we do in
Britain. We continued to give overseas aid throughout the recession - knowing
that, no matter how bad things might be for us, there were hundreds of millions
who lacked food, water, shelter, sanitation, and medicines (all things most of
us take for granted).
In Britain we value people for their
contribution to our society, not for the colour of their skin, their parentage,
whether they attend church on Sunday, how they dress, or how they vote. We care
for our sick and for the aged. We are
capable of forgiveness, something that can be sorely lacking in some other
parts of the world (Israel and Gaza spring to mind). We abolished the death
penalty in 1965.
And yet, we sometimes adopt a different
persona when we're on the Internet. We criticise people as if they were
inanimate objects, not human beings, and we foolishly believe things that seem
to fit our distorted view of the world, when a few minutes of research would
demonstrate that they are malicious rumours spread by people who ought to know
better.
You wouldn't believe some of the emails
I receive from LostCousins members who have unthinkingly forwarded an email
they've received to everyone in their address book. Or perhaps you would?
Clearly these tracts written by manipulative bigots wouldn't be so widely
circulated if a proportion of recipients didn't forward them on, and I wouldn't
receive them unless some of them weren't LostCousins members, past or present.
You may not agree with everything I write
in this newsletter, but you won't find me representing rumour as fact, or
spreading malicious gossip. Please try to do the same in your own
communications!
It has been a while since I've mentioned
jam-making, and some of you may have wondered whether - after the fiasco with
the fudge - I'd decided to stick to everyday cookery and leave preserves and
confectionery to the WI.
Nothing could be further from the truth
- in fact my Maslin pan was in action during July, turning the last of our rhubarb
crop into some deliciously spicy Rhubarb & Ginger jam (it's the first time
I've used grated root ginger), and making Blueberry & Orange jam (one of my
favourites) with heavily discounted fruit from the supermarket. It'll be in use
again shortly, as I picked up some more bargain price blueberries earlier this
week - and next month it will be time for Wild Plum jam.
On Saturday I cooked a most delicious
breakfast, adapted from a recipe I created when I was out in Portugal for Genealogy in the Sunshine. The English
version starts with half a lightly-toasted bagel liberally spread with Philadelphia
Light, and topped with a thin slice of really tasty home-cooked gammon; put
this into the oven to keep warm whilst you make some lightly-cooked scrambled
egg. I finish it off with a sprinkling of freshly-ground black pepper to create
a dish that is extremely tasty, reasonably healthy, and makes a great start to
a busy day!
When I was in Portugal I used local ham,
and local country bread made with a sourdough starter rather than conventional
yeast. Because the ham is uncooked it's slightly different in character, but
every bit as delicious. I used to go to America regularly, and in those days
Eggs Benedict was my all-time favourite breakfast - however I reckon my European
version is just as good, and it's definitely much easier to make (as well as
being far less unhealthy). Let me know what you
think!
Staying with food for a moment, whilst
we're not going to get as many wild plums as usual, this year has been a pretty
good one for blackberries (even though they're not as abundant as last year,
which was exceptional). When I was a child we went blackberry picking at
Hainault Forest, and when we got home my mother would stew them with apple (we
had a cooking apple tree in the garden). These days I'm very happy with stewed
blackberries on their own - they have more flavour than I remember (and it's
not often I can say that!).
From time to time I make mistakes in the
newsletter - usually not errors of fact, but typing errors, which are not
nearly so important, but nevertheless stick out like a sore thumb once they've
been pointed out.
I believe it was Alexander Pope who
first wrote that "To err is human, to forgive is divine", but
sometimes a mistake can be unintentionally amusing. For example, I was reading
the latest issue (Summer 2014) of Local
History News, an excellent magazine published by the British Association
for Local History, when I noticed this announcement in the supplement facing
page 18:
As any reader of this newsletter will know, the 2015 event is being held
at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, not at London's Olympia. I
normally wouldn't point out someone else's mistake (people in glass houses and
all that) but when I saw the title of the article on the very next page I'm
afraid I couldn't help laughing:
Unfortunately there's only one answer to that!
I'm not sure how long it's going to last,
but Amazon are currently offering the Kindle Fire HD (7in colour screen, 8Gb memory) for just
£89 - click here to see if the offer is still available.
Thanks for taking the time to read my
newsletter - I hope you find it useful.
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2014 Peter Calver
You
MAY link to this newsletter or email a link to your friends and relatives
without asking for permission in advance - I have included bookmarks so you can
link to a specific article: right-click on the relevant entry in the table of
contents at the beginning of this newsletter to copy the link. But why not
invite them to join instead?