Newsletter
- 8th February 2016
Irish
parish registers online and indexed from March BREAKING
NEWS
Norfolk
parish registers at Findmypast NEW
Sussex
parish registers online but hidden EXCLUSIVE
What's
the difference between one certificate and another?
Review
- Genealogy: Essential Research Methods
Family
History and the Twilight Zone GUEST ARTICLE
It's a
lot easier than you think!
My AncestorsBETA NEW
Red Cross
WW1 volunteer records nearly complete
Over
100 million US marriages to go online
Rutland
registers online? UPDATE
The LostCousins newsletter is usually published
fortnightly. To access the previous newsletter (dated 26th January) click here; to find earlier articles use the
customised Google search below (it only searches these newsletters, so you
won't get spurious results):
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of this newsletter available!
Irish parish registers
online and indexed from March BREAKING NEWS
There was fantastic news on Friday for
those with Irish ancestry - it seems that unbeknown to most of the genealogical
community Findmypast have been busy transcribing and indexing over 3500 Irish
Catholic Parish Registers that were digitised from microfilm and made available
online by the National Library of Ireland last July.
With more than 1000 parishes it's a
massive collection, which covers both the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland -
and, according to Findmypast's announcement, it will be launched in March 2016.
According to Claire Santry's
Irish Genealogy News blog the
new collection will be included in Findmypast's Ireland and World subscriptions, and
I have now been able to confirm this with Findmypast. Since the subscription
prices are going up by around 20% on 16th February you might need to act
quickly!
At current exchange rates the Australian
site offers the cheapest World subscriptions.
Tip:
by using the links above you'll be supporting LostCousins - and you might also
benefit from a last-minute offer.
Norfolk parish
registers at Findmypast
There are over 4.6 million records in
Findmypast's new Norfolk collection - the indexed transcriptions are linked to
digitised images of the parish register entries. Findmypast have made available
a list of parishes which shows the number of entries and years of coverage -
you can view it here.
As my Calver ancestors lived not far
from the border between Suffolk and Norfolk, and in a village bisected by the
toll road from Bury St Edmunds to Scole (on the
Norfolk border), it wouldn't surprise me if I discover one day that some of my
ancestors came from Norfolk - though searching the Norfolk records hasn't yet
knocked down any of my 'brick walls'.
At FamilySearch there is a much smaller
collection of entries from Norfolk registers, but you will also find Bishop's Transcripts
and Registers of
Electors, neither of which are available at Findmypast. The Genealogist
also has parish register images licensed from the Norfolk Record Office (this
is first example I can recall of a non-exclusive licence).
Sussex parish registers
online but hidden EXCLUSIVE
One of the 54 English record collections
at FamilySearch is England, Sussex, Parish Registers, 1538-1910 - but whilst there are over 770,000 records in the
collection, there are no links to images of the register entries. That means a
trip to the record office if an entry seems to be missing or mistranscribed -
or does it?
Last week I discovered, thanks to some
amazing detective work by LostCousins member Sue, how to view the Sussex
registers. And here's how you can do
it.....
First go to the FamilySearch home page, create a free
account if you haven't already done so, and log-in. Now choose Catalog from the Search menu:
Next enter a place in Sussex - I've chosen
Brighton as I know that my great-great aunt Harriet married at St Nicholas,
Brighton in 1866 - and choose Online from the dropdown menu. These are the search results
that I got:
When I clicked Church records the following list was displayed:
As you can see, I clicked on Parish
registers for St. Nicholas' Church, which gave me a long list - the screenshot
below shows just a few of those results:
Note the icons at the right - the camera
icon indicates that there are online images. All I had to do now was click it
and navigate to the right register page - which I did by trial and error,
quickly arriving at image 95 (out of 532), where I found the marriage on 13th
May 1866 of William James Lemmon to Harriet Calver.
As it happens I already have the
marriage certificate, which I purchased from the General Register Office many
years ago - but of course the GRO registers are transcribed copies of the
originals, so this was the first time I'd seen my great-great aunt Harriet's child-like
handwriting (though she was 25 when she married). I also saw the signatures of
the witnesses, spotting almost immediately that the first witness, whose name had
been transcribed in the GRO register as S Harncombe,
was actually T Farncombe.
This might not sound particularly
significant to you, but it enabled me to tentatively identify him as Thomas Farncombe, shown as a 27 year-old grocer's warehouseman on
the 1871 Census - and, as William James Lemmon is shown as a grocer's porter
1871, I could then surmise that he and Thomas had been work colleagues - and
possibly still were.
Tip:
if you have Sussex ancestors I suggest you make use of this wonderful resource
while you can - should it transpire that we're not officially supposed to have
access to these images they could disappear without warning. My guess is that
there are many more records in the image collection than have been transcribed
so far.
What's the
difference between one certificate and another?
That story from my tree reminded me that
it's a long time since I've written about the differences between certificates
ordered from the GRO, and those provided by local register offices.
Note:
this article is, like most of the articles in this newsletter, based on my
experience in England & Wales - but what I'm going to tell you might also
apply in other countries with a similar system.
The most important thing to remember is
that the GRO's registers, the books that are the ultimate source of the
information on the certified copies (certificates) they produce, are themselves
copies and not originals. This extract from Birth,
Marriage & Death Records (by David Annal
and Audrey Collins) eloquently describes the process:
"At the end of every quarter, registrars, Church
of England clergy, Secretaries of Synagogues and Quaker Registering Officers
were required to make copies of every event they had registered during the period,
or a nil return if there were no entries. These were sent to Somerset House
where an army of clerks would abstract the names and prepare the index pages
that were bound into volumes and placed on the search-room shelves."
When you order a certificate from the
GRO you will usually - though not always - receive a facsimile of the register
entry, but the handwriting you'll see will typically be that of the local
registrar, or the vicar who performed the marriage.
You won't always receive a facsimile from
the GRO - sometimes the quality of the microfilm image is so poor that they are
obliged to produce a typed or printed copy, and this offers an additional
opportunity for discrepancies to arise (since the clerk might misread the
names).
For example, in March 2003 I received from the GRO a
typed copy of the entry for my great-great-grandparents' marriage in 1858 which
gave the name of the first witness as Thomas Scatchman,
a name that meant nothing to me.
It was only when the 1851 England & Wales census went
online in late 2005 and I discovered a Thomas Scotchman recorded as a
visitor at my great-great-great grandparents' home in London's Shoreditch
district that I got more interested in Thomas - the fact that he had turned up
twice in my family records suggested that his relationship was closer than I
had previously suspected, and I eventually discovered that my great-great-great
aunt Eliza had married Thomas Scotchmer.
Without that those clues I might never have discovered the right marriage for
an Eliza Smith - especially in London, at that time the most
populous city the world had ever known.
Certificates ordered from a local
register office may show the original
handwriting, but not all register offices are able to produce facsimiles of the
register entries, and some may do so only on request - always check before
ordering.
It is my hope that when the GRO revamps
its service in the coming years it will be possible to order local certificates
via the GRO website and using the GRO indexes (at the moment the GRO index
references are meaningless to the local offices). However this is my hope, not the
GRO's aspiration, so don't be surprised if it doesn't happen - nevertheless it
would undoubtedly be a good way to protect the local register offices against
the loss of income that might otherwise result from lower cost access to the BMD
data held by the GRO.
Review - Genealogy: Essential Research Methods
Helen Osborn, co-founder of Pharos
Tutors, professional genealogist, and a long-time member of LostCousins is the
author of Genealogy:
Essential Research Methods, first published in 2012 but still extremely
relevant.
If you consider yourself to be a serious
researcher, by which I mean someone who is interested in finding out the truth
(rather than simply gathering together half-facts that appear to support your
pet theories) then this book will remind you how it ought to be done. It isn't
a book for outright beginners - if it were I wouldn't recommend it to
LostCousins members, most of whom have been
researching longer than I have - but it will be a valuable reminder for
everyone else of what we ought to be doing.
There's a big gulf between the techniques
and standards that professional genealogists must comply with and the way that
most amateurs like you and I work: for us it's a hobby, albeit one that we take
very seriously, whereas the professionals have a duty to their clients. Yet it
would be wrong to assume that it takes more time, more effort, and more expense
to do the job properly - in fact, it's usually the other way round. I'm sure
I'm not the only one who, having found a 'lost cousin', has had to re-do some
of the research done a decade ago simply because I didn't note down all of my
sources at the time.
There's a 1953 country song which
includes the line "I've forgotten more than you'll ever know", and
this pretty much sums up the haphazard way some family historians work. By
contrast I want to be able to pass on my discoveries - not by posting a public
tree online for anyone to filch, but by corresponding with my cousins - and I
would be letting myself down as well as them if I didn't document my research
properly.
Reading Helen's book has inspired me to
do better in future. Like many of you, I'll never be perfect - I could
certainly never be a professional genealogist, but that doesn't mean I have to behave
like a complete amateur. If you share my aspirations you should read this book
- and if you don't you should read it anyway, because the chances are it will
change your mind.
Available as a hardback, or as a Kindle
download, this is a book that neatly complements Andrew Todd's Family History Nuts and Bolts:
Problem-Solving through Family Reconstitution Techniques which I reviewed
recently (indeed, that's one of the books that Helen recommends to her
readers).
Note: if you buy these or any other
books (or indeed, any other products) using the links below then LostCousins
should benefit:
Amazon.co.uk Amazon.com Amazon.ca
Family History and
the Twilight Zone GUEST ARTICLE
I'm delighted that Andrew Todd, whose Nuts and Bolts book has proved so
popular with LostCousins members, agreed to accept my invitation to write an
article for LostCousins members - because the topic he has chosen is one that
affects us all:
"My husband’s first wife’s first husband
knew that Cromwell - and liked him well." (Remark made in 1923, during a
conversation recalled by someone in 1999)
Every
graveyard offers that poignant contrast between dead remembered and the dead
forgotten. This is beautifully expressed by Allen Sharp in his book A Green Tree in Geddes, in which he
describes a Mexican cemetery divided into two such parts – the 'dead' whose
graves are still visited, and commemorated with flowers placed there by the
living; and the 'truly dead' whose graves are no longer maintained, their
occupants no longer remembered by any living person. It is a stark metaphor for
how everybody passes from memory to history. But there is an intriguing middle
phase, perceptively identified by social historian Eric Hobsbawm
in his notion that there are three phases in the process by which every human
existence must glide imperceptibly out of the present and into the recesses of
the past.
In his
first stage, evidence of a human life resides as personal knowledge in living human beings, memory that can never
last beyond the longest lifetime of those that knew the deceased. The third
stage exists as - ‘years beyond memory’,
and is found within recorded history, whether written or pictorial. This is the
absolute past, and very much the
territory of the family historian.
But Hobsbawm identifies an intermediate stage, recollection handed on, family memory and
legend, which I like to call the ‘Twilight Zone’. Pure chance determines
how far back this zone extends: perhaps no further than into the late 19th
Century - my mother's grandmother Hannah Ratcliffe,
after whom my daughter is named, died in 1887; her husband remarried and any
family lore pertaining to her ancestry seems to have died with her. But in
other families, the Twilight Zone can reach back centuries. The quotation at
the start of this piece, cited by Hobsbawm, refers to
Oliver Cromwell, who died in 1658. The 1923 speaker, born in 1832, had been 91
at the time of the remark, and had married at the age of 16 to an 80 year old
man. He too had married at 16, in 1784, to an 82 year old widow. Her first
marriage had been in 1720, to an 80 year old who had been in Cromwell’s
service.
Here is
remarkable evidence of how extensive the Twilight Zone can be, and how close,
in lifetimes, we are even to remote events - just five
adult lifespans away from the English Civil War.
There is an
important distinction to be made between unproven and proven Twilight Zone
material! Someone I knew repeated a family legend of a connection with the
Sarah Jennings, wife of John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough. Similarly, a
particularly rebellious boy at my school claimed descent from Sir Thomas Wyatt,
famously beheaded for rebellion in 1556! But neither story had been confirmed
by research. It would be interesting to hear contributions to this newsletter
from researchers able to confirm Twilight Zones in their own families which
reached back beyond the usual few generations.
This is the
material that can really matter, and yet it relies upon human memory. And human
memory is dying every second. If we think back to those two halves of the Mexican
graveyard, the death of a very old person also causes the deaths of many
others, for the dead person takes them along: anybody who is remembered by no
one else becomes, at that moment, 'truly dead'.
So, the
speed with which most family history researchers rush into the absolute past of
Hobsbawm's third stage, those 'years beyond memory',
is a major mistake. All the principal sources for this stage are now infinitely
more accessible in digital format than they were just 20 years ago. How much
better it will all be in another 20 years! Why not let time solve your research
problems in the absolute past?
But perhaps
far more importantly, each time a relative dies, some other segment of your
family history becomes 'truly dead' and therefore reliant upon the unlikely
possibility that some record of it may have been created in those years beyond
memory.
Ironically,
confirming relational connections within the very recent past will be the major
stumbling blocks for family historians of the future. To take one example, in
barely half a century, marriage has changed from a near universal pre-requisite
for having children in this country to being the choice for perhaps only 50% of
childbearing couples. Post-1837 records of marriage are often the only link
between a childbearing couple and their respective ancestries.
The late
20th Century onwards could be a veritable desert for future family history
research, and this is why the Lost Cousins website will perform such an
important function. Focusing on connections four or five generations back
through the 1881 census returns, it straddles the Twilight Zones of virtually
every family.
© 2016 Andrew Todd
Note:
you can re-read my review of Andrew Todd's excellent book here;
I have a few copies available for anyone overseas who has had a problem getting
hold of it.
Andrew Todd's thought-provoking article
reminded me a problem that bedevils most of us - the challenge of unidentified
relatives in old photographs. How can we identify somebody when the only people
who would have known what they looked like are no longer alive?
I spent a considerable amount of time
with my late aunt and my late father going through the family photos that they
had inherited, and noting on the back in pencil who the people were (in the
case of group photos, such as wedding photos, I made a photocopy and annotated
it).
However, there are many ancestors who
lived in the age of photography but whose photos haven't survived, at least in
my line of the family. In some cases the cousins I've found have been able to
fill gaps, but some images will inevitably turn up only after all the relatives
who would have been able to identify the subjects have passed away.
Wouldn't it be great if we could see
what our older relatives can visualise? When will someone come up with a
consumer version of the facial
composite systems that police forces use?
It's a lot easier than
you think!
You'd be amazed how many people say that
they "don't have time" to enter information on their My Ancestors page. Or are you, perhaps, one them?
The reality is that entering your
information from the 1881 Census and finding cousins is going to SAVE you time,
not just in the long-run but often in the short-run. For a start it typically
takes no more than an hour to find your first new living relative - which is
why many members find a new cousin on the day they join. (Some new members get
a match in the first minute with their very first entry - and it's not that
unlikely, about 1 chance in 17.)
For others it's an hour from when they eventually
overcame their inertia - or their fear. Or, for those members who joined a long
time ago, when they realise that the entry process has been speeded up
enormously over the years.
Some of you might even be worried about
getting the census references wrong - well worry no more, because help is at
hand......
My AncestorsBETA
Each relative entered from the English,
Welsh, Scottish, or Irish censuses now has an arrow symbol ()
alongside. Click the arrow and a census search will automatically be carried
out, using Findmypast (England & Wales), Ancestry (Scotland), or the
National Library of Ireland. You don't need a subscription to any of those
sites, though you might have to log-in at Ancestry or Findmypast to see the
search results (which will appear in a new browser tab).
This makes it really quick and easy to
confirm that you've got the census references right - because if you haven't
you won't get any results at all, or if you do, they won't include your
relatives.
Tip:
you can check a household at a time - you don't need to check each individual
separately since all members of a household are recorded with the same
references.
It's also an opportunity to confirm that
you've entered the correct data for your relatives - beginners often make the
mistake of entering information that isn't shown in the census (even though the
Add Ancestor form explains precisely
what to do, so it's really hard to go wrong). But if you have made an error you
don't have to start again from scratch - simply click your relative's name (on
your My Ancestors page), make the
change(s) and click Save. Easy-peasy!
Glancing at the 1881 England & Wales
census recently I came across an unusual birthplace:
© Crown Copyright Image reproduced by
courtesy of The National Archives, London, England and with the kind permission
of Findmypast
It turned out there really is a place
called Dum Dum in India, and it was at the British Army arsenal there that Lieutenant-Colonel
Neville Sneyd Bertie-Clay devised in 1896 the
infamous soft-nosed bullet that was to be outlawed for use in warfare by the
Hague Convention of 1899 - despite the protestations of the British delegate,
who argued that:
"The civilized soldier when shot recognizes that
he is wounded and knows that the sooner he is attended to the sooner he will
recover. He lies down on his stretcher and is taken off the field to his
ambulance, where he is dressed or bandaged. Your fanatical barbarian, similarly
wounded, continues to rush on, spear or sword in hand; and before you have the
time to represent to him that his conduct is in flagrant violation of the
understanding relative to the proper course for the wounded man to follow—he
may have cut off your head".
This is so reminiscent of Lance-Corporal
Jones' comments about fuzzy wuzzies (his words, not
mine) that it's hard to believe that the creators of Dad's Army weren't aware of it when they created the character!
Coincidentally the new Dad's Army film came out this weekend,
and I for one look forward to seeing the stellar cast attempting to achieve the
impossible. Whilst I've no plans to review the film, I do plan to review the
book In
Search of the Real Dad's Army (about the Home Guard, not the TV series)
in a future newsletter.
Red Cross WW1 volunteer
records nearly complete
Two years ago I reported
that the Red Cross was embarking on a project to digitise all of the index
cards for WW1 volunteers - almost a quarter of a million of them. Those for
volunteers with surnames from A to V are already online,
but you'll also find many for surnames beginning with W - for example, I found
this image
of the card for Mrs H G Wells, wife of the famous author.
I hadn't realised until then that H G
Wells moved from London to Essex around the time he started writing The
History of Mr Polly - living in a house that's just a few miles away
from where LostCousins is now based. He rented Easton Glebe from Daisy Greville, the Countess of Warwick, who had been the
mistress of the King Edward VII when he was Prince of Wales. Wells himself had
several affairs, one of which was with Amber Reeves, daughter of Maud Pember Reeves whose Round
About a Pound a Week is one of the best non-fiction books I've ever
read (it records the poverty in the Lambeth area of London in the years leading
up to the Great War).
This blog article suggests
that The History of Mr Polly was
partly-inspired by the people and places of Colchester - it's certainly an
interesting theory.
Over 100 million US
marriages to go online
Findmypast are in the process of
digitising the largest online collection of US marriages in history.
When complete it will include over 100 million records covering 360
years, and it is claimed that 60% of the records have never been published
online before. You can already search 33 million records if you follow this link (though you'll need a US or World
subscription to view them after 15th February).
I suspected that many the marriages in
this first tranche were ones that had
been published online before but my experience suggests otherwise - I was
pleasantly delighted to discover almost immediately the marriage of my 2nd
cousin twice removed Frank Driesen in 1916.
Previously I didn't know what his bride's maiden name was, nor when he married
- now I not only have that information, I also know the
names of his wife's parents, including his mother-in-law's maiden name. And I'm
sure that I'll find other marriages once I've finished writing this newsletter....
It seems that the death of Family Tree
Maker was announced prematurely - the company which developed the Mac version
for Ancestry has now agreed to continue developing and supporting both the Mac
and the Windows versions. You can find out more about the new development here,
on the Ancestry blog.
If you're a Family Tree Maker user I
hope you took my advice
to delay taking any action following Ancestry's December announcement that they
would be discontinuing support on 1st January 2017.
2016 is the 400th anniversary of William
Shakespeare's death, and until 29th May his 1616 will and other documents from
the National Archives will be on display at Somerset House in London - it's an
opportunity to see no less than four examples of Shakespeare's rare signature. For
more details of the exhibition By me,William Shakespeare: A Life In
Writing follow this link.
Mind you, it doesn't seem that long
since we celebrated the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth - I distinctly
remember buying a First Day Cover with a Stratford-on-Avon postmark. However it
turns out that it was 1964, when I was a spotty teenager and, to be
scrupulously accurate, it was the 400th anniversary of his baptism - his
precise date of birth is not known (any more than it is for most of our
ancestors).
By the way, the registers for
Stratford-upon-Avon are not held at Warwickshire
County Record Office, but at the Shakespeare
Birthplace Trust Record Office .
If you follow this link
you can see the handwritten entry for William Shakespeare's baptism on 26th
April 1564 - but what you're seeing isn't, in fact, the original entry or the
original register.
Although parish registers were
introduced in 1538 by order of Thomas Cromwell, the Vicar General, it was not
until 1598 that clergy were required to use parchment, and the contents of many
of the early registers - including those for Stratford-upon-Avon - had to be copied
into more durable books. Whether or not the original records were kept they
certainly haven't survived, so we have to rely on the late 16th century copies.
Another type of copy was also introduced
in 1598 - Bishop's Transcripts were contemporary copies of register entries
that were sent annually to the diocesan office (they were supposed to be
provided within one month of Easter). Where the original registers have been
lost or destroyed Bishop's Transcripts are invaluable.
Because Bishop's Transcripts were sent
to the diocesan office, the county record office which now holds them might not
be the one you'd expect - for example, many of the BTs for Cornwall are held by
Devon, because until 1876 both counties were in the Diocese of Exeter.
In the last issue I initially reported
that you could view parish registers for some Rutland parishes amongst the
Northamptonshire parish records at Ancestry.
However I soon corrected the article to refer to Bishop's Transcripts for
Rutland, not the original registers. Rutland was in the Diocese of
Peterborough, and Peterborough - though now in Cambridgeshire - used to be in
Northamptonshire, which is how the BTs ended up there. Here's a list of the
Rutland parishes whose BTs you'll find at Ancestry:
Ashwell |
Ayston |
Belton |
Bisbrooke |
Brooke |
Burley |
Clipsham |
Cottesmore |
Edith Weston |
Egleton |
Empingham |
Essendine |
Exton |
Glaston |
Greetham |
Langham |
Lyndon |
Manton |
Market Overton |
Morcott |
Normanton |
North Luffenham |
Oakham |
Pickworth |
Pilton |
Preston |
Quinton |
Ridlington |
Ryhall |
Seaton |
South Luffenham |
Stretton |
Teigh |
Thistleton |
Tickencote |
Uppingham |
Wardley |
Whissendine |
Whitwell |
Wing |
So who holds the Rutland registers, and
will they be going online? It turns out that the registers are on permanent
loan to Leicestershire Record Office, which has contracted with Findmypast to
digitise their collection of Leicestershire parish registers (as you can see
from this Tweet,
which originated from the record office). However, it appears from the tender
document that the Rutland registers may not be included in this
contract, since it refers to records "belonging to Leicestershire County
Council". UPDATE: I've now heard that the Rutland registers will be included.
(Many thanks to all the members who
helped me research this article, especially Nicola and Tim.)
I couldn't help being reminded of the Orson
Welles classic The
Third Man when I read about the woman who turned up at her own funeral
- did you see it? I found the story here
on the Independent website, but it
was previously published in the Washington
Post.
Were you shocked by the news report which
alleged that Age UK had profited by selling poor value energy deals to senior
citizens? I'm afraid I wasn't in the least surprised - some years ago, when I
was looking for a stair-lift for my late father, the quote I got from them was
far more than we eventually paid.
Those of us who are "getting on a
bit" have also been hit harder by ever lower interest rates, and in the UK
there is no sign of them going up. You'll probably know from previous articles
that, following recommendations from LostCousins members, I've invested much of
my own spare cash with the best-known peer-to-peer lending companies, and I
thought you'd like to know that you can now get a bonus of £100 when you open
an account with peer-to-peer lending company Ratesetter on the recommendation of
an existing member, then lend £1000 or more (if you use this link to join I'll also earn £50).
What I like about Ratesetter is being able to lend for periods as short as one
month - which means I'll be able to get my money back in time to pay for our
new kitchen (when we eventually decide what we want!).
I was a little surprised to note that in
the past 2 weeks I haven't had to answer the phone once - though perhaps that's
not surprising in these days of email, smartphones, and text messaging. That's
not to say there haven't been any calls - there have, but they have all been
unwanted calls. I sat down today and tallied them up - there were 12 in all, 5
of which were number 'withheld', 4 showed up as number 'unavailable', 2 had a
number but they were bogus numbers (which looked real but had too few digits - this
is the spammers' latest trick), and the other had an international number (in
Spain, where we don't know anybody).
As regular readers will know, I'm no
longer troubled by unwanted calls because my BT8500
phone only rings when there's a call that I do want - and this ingenious
device works whether or not the number is available, unlike the inferior models
that preceded it. I think it's absolutely brilliant, and for under £40 for a
single cordless phone with answering machine, or under £50 for a twinpack, it could be one of the best investments you'll
ever make - just follow this link
for the best price.
The following paragraph was written after my wife proofread this newsletter,
so apologies for any typos.
Next Sunday is Valentine's Day - it's also
my wedding anniversary, as well as the anniversary of the day my
great-great-great grandparents married in 1809. So I was delighted to notice
that until midnight tomorrow (Tuesday) I could save an EXTRA £3, £5 or £10 on
perfume, aftershave and other cosmetics at
AllBeauty - over and above their normal
savings (which are often 50% or more). Delivery in the UK is free provided you
spend at least £15, but they ship worldwide and can display prices in several
major currencies.
Finally, a cooking tip I discovered when
cooking for guests this weekend. Rather than cooking a whole head of broccoli I
decided to steam the florets and stir-fry the stem after slicing it into thin
rounds - and it proved an inspired decision. On this occasion I stir-fried the
sliced stem with cabbage, but if you have enough there's no reason why you
couldn't cook it on its own.
Many people compare the flavour of
broccoli stems to asparagus - but on this showing I would say that broccoli is
better. I do hope you'll try it - broccoli is cheap, healthy, and delicious!
I'm going to end with a quote from the
manual for my new Russell
Hobbs electric steamer:
It certainly put a smile on my face!
I have now been able to confirm that the
Irish Catholic Registers will be included in Findmypast's Ireland and World subscriptions -
see above for links.
That's all for this issue, but I'll be
back soon with a lovely story about a 1927 adoption, a refresher on the 1939
Register, and much more besides.
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins