Newsletter
- 23rd May 2013
Ancestry fix 733,809 errors EXCLUSIVE
Is
FamilySearch any more reliable?
What's
your 'Match Potential'?
LostCousins member witnesses fire
Brain
training for genealogists
The
inventive Rector of Runwell
Findmypast
offer ENDS 31ST MAY
Hackers
continue to cause distress
The LostCousins newsletter is
usually published fortnightly. To access the previous newsletter (dated 12 May
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.
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Ancestry fix 733,809
errors EXCLUSIVE
According a survey of forum members my article
about Ancestry's data errors was by far the most popular of the last newsletter.
Whilst it was fairly easy to identify incorrect entries that didn't belong in
1872, the real problem was the fact that the marriages incorrectly ascribed to
1872 wouldn't show up in a search of the years to which they actually belonged.
It's heartening to see that as direct
result of that article Ancestry have removed almost three-quarters of a million
incorrect marriage entries from 1872! I wonder how many 'brick walls' will now
come tumbling down?
I haven't been able to check whether
they've all been allocated to the correct years, but the entry that led me to
the discovery - the misplaced marriage of Solomon Surch
- has certainly found its way to 1887, where it belongs. One thing is certainly
missing, though - a "thank you" note from Ancestry - but then again,
I didn't do it for them, I did it for YOU!
Unfortunately those aren't the only
errors in Ancestry's GRO indexes - following my article Angela pointed out that
there are far too many births in 1915, and too many deaths in 1914. In the 78th
Annual Report of the Registrar General he stated that:
"The
births registered in the year 1915 numbered 814,614; of these 778,369 were
legitimate and 36,245 illegitimate."
Ancestry show 1,697,117
births for the year 1915, which suggests that they have incorrectly recorded
over 880,000 birth entries.
Similarly in 1914, the Registrar General reported
516,742 deaths, but Ancestry list 820,533 deaths as being registered in that
year, over 300,000 more. For example, Harriet Calver
(no relation so far as I know) died in Hendon in 1884 aged 70, but at Ancestry
her death is shown as 1914 (with an implied birth year of 1844, also 30 years
out).
These are all simple checks that anyone
could have carried out, yet Ancestry - the biggest genealogy company that the
world has ever known - let nearly 2 million errors creep into their records.
It's not as if they are transcription errors - the data was provided by
FreeBMD, who show the entries correctly in their own online indexes.
Is FamilySearch any
more reliable?
When I was starting my research I tried
using FamilySearch to trace my Suffolk ancestors, but kept coming up against
the problem that transcriptions of Bishop's Transcripts didn't specify the name
of the parish where the baptism took place - so I was sympathetic when another
LostCousins members (another Peter) contacted me recently to tell me about the
problems he'd found researching in Norfolk.
FamilySearch is, on the face of it, a
good place to research your Norfolk ancestors because it has images of most of
the Norfolk parish registers. However, whilst they are in the process of
transcribing the entries if you search for Norfolk baptisms at the moment the
entries are most likely to come from datasets inherited from the old
FamilySearch site - and as Peter pointed out, these leave a lot to be desired.
For example, he found this entry during
his research:
However, when checking Garboldisham baptisms in the digitised registers he
couldn't find a corresponding entry. Indeed, it was only when he searched at FreeREG, the amazingly underfunded and
unappreciated sibling of FreeBMD, that he discovered
that the baptism actually took place at Docking - which is on the other side of
the county!
Of course, we should never rely on
transcriptions - but the real problem here is that someone looking for baptisms
in the Docking area might well disregard an entry ascribed to Garboldisham. Peter tells me that he has come across many
similar examples - have other readers had a similar experience?
Wills for England & Wales from 1858,
when the responsibility for record-keeping passed from the Church to state, are
held by the Probate
Service and you can search the National
Probate Calendar for 1858-1966 at Ancestry.
But finding wills prior to 1858 is often
much more difficult: most Welsh wills are available free online at the National Library of Wales
site, but it can be much harder to track down English wills. Most readers of
this newsletter will be aware that wills proved in the Prerogative Court of
Canterbury are available at the National Archives
website for £3.36 per will (or free to Gold and Diamond subscribers at The Genealogist)
- but there were as many as 300 other courts that had jurisdiction over wills
at some point or other prior to 1858.
Pre-1858 Probate
Jurisdictions is a valuable free resource at Origins.net - there is an
outline map of each English county (based on the pre-1974 boundaries) showing
which parts of the county were subject to the jurisdiction of each archdeaconry
or diocese. Origins is also home to the National Wills Index, some
parts of which can be searched free of charge.
You can search several will indexes at findmypast,
and wills for Cheshire can be viewed online. FamilySearch has images of many
Kent wills, but they are only viewable at certain FamilySearch centres. Wills
for the Diocese of London Consistory Court were indexed by volunteers at the
London Metropolitan Archives and there are online indexes here,
but there is a larger collection of London wills at Ancestry.
What's your
'Match Potential'?
Don't worry, I'm not setting up a dating
site - LostCousins is all about finding relatives, not future partners!
What I really want to tell you about is
a new figure called Match Potential
that you may have noticed on your My
Summary page - it indicates how many new relatives (or 'lost cousins') you
are likely to have found given average luck. For example, if the number shown
is 1.49 then the chances are you've found 1 or 2 new relatives (and if you've
found 0 or 1 you've been less fortunate than average, whilst if you've found 2
or more you've been luckier than most).
How can you increase your Match
Potential? The great thing is, you don't necessarily
have to do anything! Naturally the quickest way to see an improvement is to add more relatives to your My Ancestors page, especially relatives
from the 1881 Census - but your Match Potential also goes up when other members
add relatives to their My Ancestors
page. For example, if everyone reading this newsletter enters just ONE relative
from the 1881 Census my own Match Potential will go up by 0.23 even if I don't enter anyone myself.
Of course, if you haven't entered any
relatives at all, your Match Potential is going to stay at zero no matter how
many relatives other members enter. This reflects the fact that until you
provide some information the LostCousins computer can't possibly know who your
cousins are. Try looking at it from your cousins' point of view - even if they
enter thousands of their own relatives (as some members have), they'll never be
able to connect with you.
On the bright side, when you start from
a low base it's very easy to make a difference - even 10 minutes could take you
from 0 to 0.1 or more, so just imagine what 10 minutes a day would do!
When I was a young boy in the late 1950s
I was absolutely fascinated by science fiction, and would walk around the
public library looking for Gollancz titles in their
distinctive yellow jackets. When man walked on the moon in 1969 it seemed as if
science fiction would become science reality, but eventually the money ran out and
took the dream with it.
I wrote last month
about the plans to send a couple to Mars with no apparent means of returning to
Earth. This week's New Scientist has
an article
describing ambitious plans to set up a permanent colony which would grow its
own food in Martian soil, and mine resources that can be shipped back to earth -
rather like Avatar
(by far the best 3D film I've ever seen).
Plants would need to adapt to the
environment, but so would humans - and it's possible to imagine that over many
generations the colonists would develop distinctive characteristics, just as
Americans of British origin usually speak very differently from the descendants
of the relatives their ancestors left behind. Some scientists believe that the remains
found on the Indonesian island of Flores (often referred to as the 'hobbit')
could be those of an island population that developed differently because of
its isolation.
If the human race does manage to create
a self-sustainable colony on Mars, I wonder whether at some point in the future
they might evolve into a different species?
Postscript: one of the proponents of the
plan to colonise Mars is Buzz Aldrin, the second man
to walk on the moon. Many years ago I had an opportunity to talk to him when he
was promoting a computer game - but sadly I didn't follow up on it. I wouldn't
make that mistake again!
Tony wrote to tell me a story from his youth
which gave him some insight into how cemeteries are managed:
"Your
newsletter has recently covered stories about cemeteries and the vandalism of
the authorities responsible for their maintenance. They always take me back to
my time as an 18 year old trainee surveyor in the Estates Department of
Leicester City Council in the early 1960s. Apart from more conventional estate
management responsibilities this department also managed the city cemeteries.
One day the senior surveyor in charge of that responsibility told me that he
was off to see the 'digger driver' to ensure that he was doing his job
properly. I naively asked him what they used a mechanical shovel for at a
cemetery and he patiently explained its many uses - but on that day they needed
to scrape the area where ashes were strewn because after many years use the
ground was much higher than the surrounding area, which didn't look right.
Somewhat shocked I asked him what happened to the 'scrapings' and he told me
that they were put on lorries and taken down to a
municipal tip."
Lesley recently visited Manor Park
Cemetery, where several of my own ancestors are buried, and took this
photograph of an area that has been cleared and bulldozed ready for reuse.
While there she fell into conversation
with a regular visitor, who told her of his concerns about what was happening:
"We
spoke about the razing of parts of the cemetery, something he was unhappy
about. He told me that some gravestones
had been moved from their graves, and propped up by a wall where they were
left, turned towards the wall so they could not be seen. Others had been sold for re-use, new
inscriptions being carved on the reverse side!
Even large monuments in granite or marble were being sold for
ridiculously low prices.
"He
spoke of his belief that a history was shown on the gravestones. He showed me one for some of the hundreds of
victims of a Thames boat disaster when it had been hit by a large vessel on its
return to London after a pleasure day trip."
As the prices of burial plots rise there
are new cemeteries springing up around the country, some of which are seeking
finance from investors based on projections of a continued increase. My
personal suspicion is that the trend towards cremation will continue, and so
there's a possibility that some of the investors will get their fingers burnt
(rather than reaping the anticipated profits).
At least Manor Park has its records
online, so that they can be searched at a reasonable cost - allowing interested
relatives to take the necessary action to protect their ancestors' resting
places. It cost me nothing to search for relatives who are buried there using
Deceased Online, and whilst I subsequently spent £20 on credits to get the
details of the burials, I could easily spend one hundred times as much searching
in the paper records of the nearby City of London Cemetery, yet find nothing. Shouldn't
all cemetery records should be made available online before cemeteries are allowed
to reuse plots?
LostCousins member witnesses fire
In the last newsletter I reported the
fire at the National Library of Wales, but it's still not clear what records
have been destroyed. However, I thought you'd be interested to read an
eye-witness report from LostCousins member Sian:
"I was
in the building at the time and we all thought it was just another false alarm
until we got outside to see the roof on fire and smoke and flames billowing
upwards. The fire was in the extension
at the back of the building where new collections were being categorised. The roof collapsed and there was water damage
to six floors. The staff lost all their
personal possessions and there was damage to some of the collections. I had this information from a friend who
works there.
"I
cannot tell you how distressing it was for us to stand in the car park watching
this fire take hold knowing that maybe irreplaceable damage was being done to
pictures and documents. When I have been
asked what I would rescue if my home was ablaze I have always said my precious
photos and family history collection because they are irreplaceable and to me
more valuable than the crown jewels. Apparently workman had been doing repairs
at the leisure centre which adjoins the building and I am highly suspicious
that one of them may have been responsible just as they were for the fire at
Windsor Castle which did so much damage. As we left Aberystwyth you could see
the smoke for miles, it looked like a bomb had been dropped.It
is a day I will never forget."
The cause of the fire has now been
identified - according to a statement
by Mid and West Wales Fire and Rescue Service it was
caused by a blow torch that was being used to strip bitumen from the roof.
What possessions would you want to
rescue if your home was going up in flames?
Note:
the Aberystwyth Crew Lists which I thought could be viewed online (see last
issue) can in fact only be seen when you visit the National Library of Wales.
Hopefully that will change in the near future.
Brain training for
genealogists
There's an article in the latest (June
2013) edition of Your Family Tree
which suggests that you can improve your research by developing key skills.
Several of them are skills I've tried to nurture in readers of this newsletter
- such as "Eliminate the impossible" (see the article
from last August entitled Is the answer staring you in the face),
"Lateral thinking", and "Logical problems".
Sometimes it can be very difficult to
ignore our instinct - you wouldn't believe some of the emails I received after
publishing the solution
to the door challenge a month ago. Should anyone still be in doubt I posted a
slightly different explanation on the LostCousins forum, which goes like this:
If you play
the game many times over the prize must start off behind door A one-third of the time, door B one-third, and door C
one-third.
Since the
prize can't move from one door to another, at the end of the game the prize
must also be behind door A one-third of the time, door B one-third, and door C
one-third.
This means
that if you always pick door A and stick with it you can only win one-third of
the time. One-third of the time B will be the winner (and the host will open
door C); one third of the time C will be the winner (and the host will open
door B).
This is why
switching doubles your chances of winning from one-third to two-thirds - you
win whenever the prize started off behind either B or C.
When the forum opens you'll be able to
read other explanations posted by members, all of which confirm that by
switching you double your chance of winning. Puzzles like this demonstrate how
easy it is to be misled by our instincts - just as our eyes can be fooled by
optical illusions, our logical mind can sometimes be overruled by emotion. And
since researching our family history can invoke all sorts of emotions, we have
to be extremely careful that our beliefs and fears don’t lead us to incorrect
solutions.
Tip:
if you want to see an optical illusion, focus on the keyboard diagram in the
next article, then scroll the screen up and down using the mouse wheel.
What did you make of the gobbledegook in the newspaper
article from 1900 that I featured last time? I was swamped with emails from
members, many of whom put etaoin shrdlu into Google and found Wikipedia articles (and others)
that explained why this gibberish occasionally turns up in old newspapers.
Chris, one of our most loyal members, was the first to come up with the right
answer, and he won a 12 month extension to his existing LostCousins
subscription.
In the late 19th century the first
automated typesetting machines were manufactured; Linotype machines were ideal
for newspapers up against deadlines, but there was one problem - they didn't
have a delete key. The only thing that the operator could do was finish the line as quickly as possible, then retype it
without the error. (There was no wastage because the faulty line would be
melted down and reused.)
The diagram below, taken from a 1925 manual, shows the keyboard layout, which was
quite different from that of a typewriter. The operator would run his finger
down the first two columns of the keyboard until the line was complete, then
start again on a new line. Normally it would be the job of a proofreader to remove the offending line, but it might also
have been done by the typesetter himself.
Reading the manual it was fascinating to
see how lines were justified in those days. Spaces were created by inserting
spring-loaded blocks between adjacent words and then - when there were was no
room for more words on the line - the operator would allow the springs to
expand, leaving evenly-spaced gaps between the words.
It was only when I was corresponding
with one of the scores of members who wrote in that I remembered an occasion
over half a century ago, when my late father - who worked as a proofreader but had previously had his own very small (and
barely profitable) printing business - took me to the office where he worked in
London, and demonstrated a Linotype machine in action. I remember him putting
his hand around the right-hand side of the machine and retrieving a slug of
metal which bore a mirror image of the words he had just typed. What a shame I
wasn't able to keep it as a memento!
Twenty years later 'hot metal' became a
thing of the past, as computerised typesetting took over, and proofreaders were pensioned off (my father retired at 65,
just before his newspaper relocated in Wapping).
Isn't it amazing how our memories work -
and how previously forgotten events can suddenly come to the surface? It just
shows how important it is to talk to our relatives and remind them of the
things they've forgotten - usually it will be at least as rewarding for them as
it is for us.
The inventive Rector of Runwell
You may recall that the same press
cutting featured an article about the Rector of Runwell,
in Essex, who had invented a contraption for ringing the church bells using
electricity. Whilst I wasn't able to track down the patent he'd filed for this
particular invention, Elizabeth in the US discovered several patents that he
had filed there - you can see them by searching for Henry Kingsford Harris using Google
patents.
According to his 1941 obituary, which
was carried by the journal of the Institute of Engineering and Technology, he
was Rector at Runwell for 18 years, and you'll find
him there on the 1901 census. In 1911 he wasn't in Runwell
on Census Night: he was staying at the Constitutional Club in London,
and as a fellow guest was a Patent Agent, I wonder whether they were meeting to
discuss an invention?
Note:
the problem of finding bellringers is still with us -
Nicola sent me a link to this article in
an Indian newspaper.
Findmypast offer ENDS 31ST MAY
You've got one week left to save 10% on
a findmypast subscription and collect a free LostCousins subscription. For full
details see this article
in my last newsletter (and please follow the instructions very carefully if you
want to support LostCousins and
qualify for a free subscription).
By the way, if you think it's unfair
that findmypast is offering discounts to new members I should point out that they're
not discriminating against their existing subscribers - all subscribers to
findmypast.co.uk get a 10% Loyalty Discount when their subscription is renewed
automatically.
Hackers continue to
cause distress
This email I received from Ann speaks
for itself:
"Further
to your piece in the latest newsletter about Yahoo accounts being high-jacked. I received an email last Sunday supposedly
from a friend, it came as something of a shock, she's
been dead for 4 years! It was also addressed
to one of her daughters, which I was disgusted by. If only these morons
realised the distress they cause."
Sadly people engaged in criminal
activities don't care what problems they cause. All we can do is make it
difficult for them by switching to mail services with better security, picking
passwords that are impossible to break, and not using webmail unless we really
need to.
I thought you'd be interested in a tip I
recently posted on the LostCousins forum, and which has proven very popular:
It's certainly a good way to get your Match Potential up - and it only takes
10 minutes to perform the check!
Now a shopping tip - one that will probably work all over the world. As you know, I usually aim to visit my local
supermarket around the time that they're reducing food for quick sale, and I
often pick up ready meals that can be frozen at home. There's a wide range of
them at my local supermarket, but I aim to buy the ones that come in clear
plastic packs with lids - because I can reuse them to store in the freezer excess
portions of meals I've cooked myself. Often
the price I pay for the meal is less than the supermarket would normally charge
for an empty plastic container, so it's a really good deal.
Is summer just around the corner? I hope
so! From Ibiza to the Norfolk Broads, the weather has been far colder - and in
many places wetter - than normal, and the UK is on
track for its coldest spring since 1979. Since I'm far more likely to be on the
Norfolk Broads than in Ibiza I'm hedging my bets by downloading electronic
books to my Kindle! Steve Robinson's genealogical
mysteries are already there, of course, but there are an increasing number
of non-fiction
genealogy titles available for the Kindle.
Finally, an offer that's only likely to
be of interest if you live in the UK. Albelli
are offering 67% off a large photo book with photo cover - which brings the
price down from £29.90 to just £9.95 - and their No Quibble Guarantee still
applies, so it's hard to see how you can lose out. Click here
to go straight to the special offer page and use the promotion code NBUXLPB (offer ends 28th May).
Just after this newsletter was published findmypast announced the
addition of 450,000 parish records - for full details see here.
I hope you've found this newsletter
interesting and that you'll make full use of your membership of my site to link
with the cousins you don't yet know (your 'lost cousins'). After all, that's
what LostCousins is all about!
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2013 Peter Calver
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