Newsletter
– 6th November 2014
Free
weekend at Findmypast ENDS NOON MONDAY
Irish
certificate scam – don’t be fooled
LostCousins
is FREE this weekend ENDS TUESDAY
Census
reference checking gadget proves popular
Read
all about it! Half price newspapers at British Newspaper Archive
Empress of Ireland
- your stories
When
truth can be stranger than fiction
3
days free OR 73 days free – you choose ENDS TODAY
The LostCousins newsletter is usually published
fortnightly. To access the previous newsletter (dated 29th October) 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. Or use a Google search prefixed by 'site:lostcousins.com'
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). If one of
the links doesn't work this normally indicates that you're using adblocking software - try disabling it temporarily (or else
use a different browser, such as Chrome).
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 weekend at
Findmypast ENDS NOON MONDAY
Between 12 noon (London time) on Friday
7th November and the same time on Monday 10th November EVERYONE will have
virtually unlimited FREE access to Findmypast’s entire Worldwide collection of
historical records and newspaper articles.
Note:
Findmypast’s modern records - the 2002-13 Electoral Roll and Company Directors
index - are excluded from this offer. There is also a limit to the number of
historical records you can view, but it’s set at 1000 per day, and there’s
little chance you’ll get anywhere near the limit.
You don’t need an offer code – simply
click the appropriate link from the four below to go to the special page at
your preferred Findmypast site.
BRITAIN: Findmypast.co.uk
IRELAND: Findmypast.ie
USA: Findmypast.com
AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND: Findmypast.com.au
All of the sites offer the same records
and the same searches, so you need only visit one site.
Note:
though you will need to register or log-in (if you’ve already registered), you
won’t be asked to provide credit card or bank details.
Existing subscribers aren’t forgotten:
subscribers with Local subscriptions, eg Britain,
Ireland, US & Canada or Australia & New Zealand will have access to
worldwide records over the weekend, so it’s a great opportunity to track down
those relatives who seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth! And
whilst World subscribers already have access to all of Findmypast’s records,
they haven’t been forgotten either - Findmypast are going to extend their
subscriptions by 3 days.
Tip:
12 noon in London is 11pm in Sydney, 7am in New York, and 4am in California.
Irish certificate scam –
don’t be fooled
Katherine wrote to me recently,
concerned that the cost of Irish birth, marriage, and death certificates had
shot up to 40 Euros – an extortionate amount.
I eventually worked out that Katherine
had been looking at this site:
It’s perfectly legal to sell goods at
high prices – but this site goes out of its way to hide the fact that it isn’t
a government site so that it can charge 40 Euros for certificates that ought to
cost 20 Euros.
Whilst it admits that
it’s a private company (if you go right to the end of the terms and
conditions), it then goes on to say "which was funded and set up with
government support" - a statement that might be thought by some to imply
official endorsement.
If you want to order Irish certificates
online, I recommend you get them from the official government site (which
you'll find here)
and nobody else. However, family historians don't usually need a certificate -
an uncertified copy of the register entry is perfectly adequate for most
researchers - and it costs just 4 Euros.
I'm always envious when I hear of people
who have inherited a family Bible which sets out the genealogy of their
ancestors - because in my family those Bibles must have ended up with distant
cousins who I've yet to discover.
I conceived of LostCousins - more than
10 years ago - primarily as a way of bringing together distant cousins so that
they could share the photographs, memories, and tangible possessions that had
been passed down within the family.
After all, there's a limit to what we
can find in public archives - few of us are so lucky as to discover our family
papers in the vaults - so when we're trying to turn our family trees into
family histories we need to work really hard. Even now that so many newspapers
are available online we're only going to learn about the relatives who did
something - good or bad - that was in some way notable (and that's assuming
that the newspapers got it right - a big assumption!).
Of course, we can simply guess - as some
do - how our ancestors and their families lived, adding flesh to the bare bones
in the way that biographers of historical figures must surely do on occasions.
But whilst it might fill our need to write down our ancestors' stories, we may
be doing them a disservice by our inventions - particularly since future
generations might assume that what we've written is gospel (as we may sometimes
do when looking at the writings of earlier historians, or the genealogies that
were produced centuries ago in order to make some claim to nobility).
So let's all do what we can to discover
our cousins and share what we have with them. We may never know all the truth,
but let's at least strive to find out what we can!
LostCousins is FREE this weekend
ENDS TUESDAY
This weekend LostCousins will
be free - 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'.
I've arranged this at short notice to coincide
with the free weekend at Findmypast,
because whilst the 1881 England & Wales Census transcription is always
free, tracking your collateral lines through to 1881 requires access to earlier
censuses (and in some cases, parish records). Whilst the Findmypast offer runs
from Friday afternoon to Monday morning, the LostCousins offer starts now and
runs right through until Tuesday evening!
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: to benefit from this offer you
don't need to get a reply before it 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 Findmypast to identify your direct ancestors' extended families, and enter
them on your My Ancestors page as you
go.
A good strategy is to start from the
1841 Census and trace your 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.
Right now you might be thinking -
what's the point of entering such distant relatives? But in reality 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.
Census reference
checking gadget proves popular
Thanks to everyone who has written to
tell me how useful they've found the new feature on the My Ancestors page which allows you to check the census references
you've entered with a single click.
Of course, it's not only a great way to
check entries you've made in the past - you can use it to check an entry you've
just made. In fact, the very best time to use the new gadget is after entering
the head of household, but before entering other members of the household.
See my article
in the last newsletter for more details.
I thought his article on the
BBC website was very interesting - I'm sure there are plenty of other cities
with a similar tale to tell!
Read all about it! Half
price newspapers at British Newspaper Archive
Until Wednesday 12th November you can
buy a 12 month subscription to the British
Newspaper Archive for half-price, that's £39.98 instead of £79.95
Whilst this offer is clearly aimed at
Ancestry subscribers, who don't have access to an equivalent resource, I know
that some Findmypast subscribers prefer the more advanced features offered by
the BNA's search.
To take advantage of this offer (and
support LostCousins) follow this link
and use the offer code NOVEMBER12
Empress of Ireland - your stories
I was amazed to discover how many
LostCousins members lost relatives when the Empress
of Ireland sank on 21st May 1914.
Claire's great uncle and his wife were
amongst 167 members of the Salvation Army on board the ship that fateful night;
they and most of their colleagues perished (only 8 survived). Betty wrote from
Australia to tell me that her great-grandfather, a Commissioner in the
Salvation Army, was subsequently sent to Canada to replace the Territorial
Commander of Canada East, who was amongst those who were lost.
Valentine's great-aunt Alma Fedora Maud Assafrey (photo, right) had gone to Canada to marry her
fiancé, but a month later she was on her way back home, still single - nobody
knows why. She never made it.
Martin in South Africa told me that his
wife's grandfather Alexander Craik was a steward on
the ship, but although over half the crew survived, he wasn't one of the lucky
ones - he left 6 children fatherless.
Margaret's great-great-great uncle Ralph
Spooner, his wife Margaret and daughter-in-law Mary all died on the Empress; they were returning to England
to live out their days, having emigrated to Canada in
1903.
Ed also lost 3 relatives: Martha
Braithwaite, and her sons William and John. Chris lost 4 family members: her
great aunt Mary McGachen perished, along with her two
daughters and an infant. Sadly, only 4 children out of 138 survived when the
ship sank.
Note:
if you have access to the British
Newspaper Archive there are several articles about the sinking in the
North-Eastern Daily Gazette of 2nd June 1914, one of which mentions Mrs McGachen and her family.
There was just one member who could
report that her relatives had survived - and thank goodness they did, because
otherwise Denise wouldn't have been born! When the Empress of Ireland sank her grandparents Thomas and Margaret
Greenaway were on their honeymoon, having married just one week earlier.
Part of the large Salvation Army
contingent, Margaret later wrote a letter describing her terrifying experiences
and explaining how in the chaos she became separated from her new husband, with
the result that for some time afterwards each of them believed that the other
had drowned. This brief extract will give you some idea of what she went
through (but you'll find the entire letter here):
Earlier this year Denise and her two
sisters attended the event commemorating the 100th anniversary of the disaster
in Rimouski, Quebec - close to where the liner capsized. Not surprisingly it
was an extremely emotional event - everyone there had a tale to tell, though of
course it was all hearsay, the last survivor having died about 20 years ago.
Thank you to everyone who has sent in
their stories - I'm only sorry that it hasn't been possible to include all the
information I've been sent. But there's one more story that I've yet to tell……
When truth can be
stranger than fiction
I'm sure that many of you will, by now, have
finished reading Steve Robinson's latest genealogical novel, The Lost Empress which starts with the
question "Did Mrs Stilwell drown when the Empress of Ireland sank in the St Lawrence river on that fateful
night in 1914?".
Genealogist Jefferson Tayte is employed by a client who believes his grandmother
was on the ship - but she is listed in all the records as one of those who
perished, as was her husband. But did she did survive - and if so, why would
Alice Stilwell not return to England and her two young children?
I'd just finished reading the book when
Andrew wrote to me from Australia with an amazing tale - his wife's
great-grandmother died when the Empress
of Ireland went down, but she wasn't shown on the casualty lists.
I'll let Andrew pick up the tale….
"Mary Ann Griffin was on a solo world
trip. She was a 53 year-old widow with 14 children - the youngest was only 13.
Her husband, a prominent brickmaker, had died nearly
10 years earlier. It always intrigued us that her name wasn't on the official
list, and that her death wasn't announced in the local newpapers.
The first notice in the papers was more than a year afterwards when probate was
granted on her estate. We also wondered about why she would make such a trip by
herself.
"There were only two people from South
Australia on the official list of deaths: a Mr Richardson and his wife.
However, Richardson had been estranged from his wife for many years and so she
certainly did not die in the disaster. Coincidentally, he was also a
prominent brickmaker who lived less than a mile from
Mary Ann, and had been her local councillor…. suddenly the penny dropped!
"Interestingly this liaison was only
revealed in the last 12 months - we didn't have a sniff of the scandal. The Richardson
family found it out - after all, they'd been looking for the 'other woman' for
years. Mary Ann's relatives must surely have known, but if so they kept it very
quiet.
"Their
passages to Vancouver via New Zealand had been separately booked, but the
booking for the Empress of Ireland was made in Vancouver, prior to a few weeks
travel in the US and Canada. Apparently the plan was to travel together until
the end of the trip, when the final voyage would also be separately booked (a
sensible precaution given that in those days passenger lists were often
reported in the local newspapers)."
Although this is a very different tale
from the one in the book, it's an amazing coincidence that the basic premise
should be so similar - a wife who may or may not have died in the disaster.
By the way, if you decide to buy the
book (which I thoroughly enjoyed), please use one of the Amazon links you'll
find here
- that way you'll be supporting LostCousins.
Note:
one wife who mysteriously disappeared, though without
the aid of an ocean liner, was Agatha Christie - who vanished for 11 days in
December 1926. This story may have inspired the recent novel Gone
Girl, which has now been turned into a film.
Although for the 1880/81 censuses we use
transcriptions at LostCousins, I'm sure you don't rely on those transcriptions
for your family tree - you take a look at what the enumerator actually wrote
or, in 1911, what the head of household put down.
But because it was, until relatively
recently, virtually impossible to find images of parish registers online many
of us will have been in the habit of relying on transcriptions, whether from
the IGI or other sources.
However, as we all know in our heart of
hearts, transcriptions of parish registers are often incomplete, and sometimes
wrong. But whilst many parish registers are now available online, thanks mainly
to Ancestry and Findmypast, the vast majority aren't. That might not be a
problem if you live close the relevant record office, but few of us have such
convenient ancestries, and some are on the other side of the world. You could
visit your nearest LDS Family History Centre, but that could also be a long way
away.
Fortunately there is a solution: if you
live more than 50 miles from your nearest Family History Centre FamilySearch
will provide free digital copies of entries from the registers they have
microfilmed - and their collection is far greater than you might think. See
this newsletter article
from March 2013.
Tip:
in that 2013 article I mention that you can use Hugh Wallis's site to find out
which registers are included in the IGI; however a better site is now
available, provided by Steve Archer - you'll find it here.
3 days free OR 73 days
free – you choose ENDS
TODAY
It’s decision time - do you go for a free 3-day weekend at
Findmypast, or a 20% discount on an Annual subscription, equivalent to 73 days
free? You can’t do both - if you wait for the free weekend the discount offer
will be over.
Findmypast’s Halloween offer, which ends
at 11.59pm on Thursday 6th November offers new and
lapsed subscribers a 20% discount on ANY Findmypast subscription at ANY
Findmypast site. Simply click one of the links below to go to the special offer
page at the appropriate site:
BRITAIN: Findmypast.co.uk
IRELAND: Findmypast.ie
USA: Findmypast.com
AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND: Findmypast.com.au
Tip: if the Findmypast links in this newsletter don’t work, disable your
adblocking software or use a different browser (I
recommend Chrome).
Whilst this offer also
applies to the 1 month subscription, you'll only save on your first month's
subscription – and after that you'll pay full price. So my advice is to go for
a 12 month subscription so that you lock in your savings for a full year!
Note:
if after logging-in at Findmypast you’re taken to the home page simply click
the link above a second time.
Researching your family tree is thought
to be a good way of staving off the effects of dementia, but the way that Derek
Hardwick is using family trees in a hospice is new to me - you can read all
about it here.
If anyone who knows Derek is reading
this, please tell him that there's a free LostCousins subscription waiting for
him!
Finally, I'm glad to say that Genealogy in the Sunshine 2015 is almost
sold out with 59 attendees and speakers already confirmed. If you are
interested in one of the few remaining places please get in touch right away -
you'll find information about the course here.
This is where I'll post any last minute
additions.
Thanks for taking the time to read my
newsletter - I hope you find it useful.
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2014 Peter Calver
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