Newsletter
- 27th February 2015
Northamptonshire
registers online NEW
Royal
Navy records at Ancestry
7
million articles from Irish newspapers
Australian
census under threat
Aunt
Betty was a WW1 spy - or was she?
Writing
about your family's history
Using Y-DNA
to verify your research
Verifying
your research using autosomal DNA
Analysing
old family photographs
Church
graffiti reveals plague victims
Did
rats really cause the Black Death?
How long
does your PC take to boot?
The LostCousins newsletter is usually published
fortnightly. To access the previous newsletter (dated 13th February)
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
2012-14 click here. Or use the customised Google search below
(that's what I do):
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 - you need to make the LostCousins site
an exception (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!
Northamptonshire
registers online NEW
Ancestry.co.uk have
made available online indexed register images for Northamptonshire which
include 781,000 baptisms
and 478,000 burials
covering the period 1813-1912.
Tip:
you won't find these records listed under 'Recently added and updated
collections' because the release date has been erroneously entered as 2014,
rather than 2015.
Royal Navy records at
Ancestry
Ancestry have also added nearly 388,000
records of Royal
Navy Seamen from ADM188 at the National Archives; the records include seamen
who began their service between 1900-18 and list the ships they served on as
well as some personal details
Tip:
if you don't have an Ancestry subscription the same Royal Navy records appear
to be available through Findmypast
Other Royal Navy records at Ancestry
include:
Naval
Officer and Rating Service Records, 1802-1919
Naval
Medal and Award Rolls, 1793-1972
7 million articles
from Irish newspapers
With the addition of 1.6 million new
articles since January, there are now over 7 million articles from 65 Irish
publications in the newspaper collection at Findmypast.ie
(you can also access them from other Findmypast sites if you have a World
subscription).
Australian census under
threat
The Australian government are
considering scrapping their census after 2016 according to this article.
Note:
until very recently Australian censuses were destroyed once the statistical information
had been extracted.
Aunt Betty was a WW1
spy.... or was she?
Last Sunday the Independent published
the tale of Ethel Raine, known to her family as Aunt
Betty. The headline reads " Ethel Raine: The untold story of a woman who spied for Britain
during the Great War", and the information in the article seems to have
been gathered by her grandson.
But is the story true? As anyone who has
written to me asking for advice will know, I don't take things at face value -
and when I attempted to verify some of the details in the article I ran into a
brick wall. For example, the newspaper article says that Ethel was 27 years old
in 1915, which means she would have been born in 1887/88. But it also says that
she was the daughter of Sir Walter Raine, who was MP
for Sunderland after the Great War.
Walter Raine,
who was knighted in 1927 according to his obituary
in the Glasgow Herald of 20th
December 1938, was indeed MP for Sunderland between 1922-29,
but as he was only 64 years old when he died it seems extremely unlikely that
he was Ethel's father. He didn't marry until 1899, and would have been no more
than 14 when Ethel was born.
I then found an earlier article,
published on the website of the Hull Daily
Mail on 18th December. This doesn't mention Sir Walter Raine
at all, but says that she was born in Sunderland and that she was 86 years old
when she died in 1974. This suggests that she is the Ethel Stonehouse
whose death was registered in Holderness registration district in the 1st
quarter of 1974, and whose birth date is given in the death index as 3rd June
1888.
There is an Ethel Raine
who was born in Sunderland in 1888, and her birth was registered in the second
quarter of 1888. My guess is that she's the Ethel Raine
aged 12 who is living with her father William, an Inland Revenue clerk, on the
1901 Census, but it is only a guess - maybe someone reading this can pick up
the baton and find out more? (She appears on a few Ancestry
trees, but they give her year of birth as 1895.)
Oh, and by the way - the Hull Daily Mail tells us that Edith's
job was "to supervise soldiers’ leave throughout the war". Hardly the
job of a spy - it sounds to me as if she was more Miss Moneypenny
than Pussy Galore.
Tip:
don't believe anything you read, unless you have verified it yourself!
Writing about your
family's history
These days most family historians have
computers, word processing programs, and printers - some of us even have our
own websites. This means it's easier than ever before to write about our family
and share our stories with others.
But what sort of story are you going to write about your ancestors and their families - will
it be strictly limited to documented facts, or will you enliven it by adding
stories handed down within the family, and by making reasonable assumptions
about the reasons for the decisions that your antecedents made?
Few of us are going to spend hundreds of
hours writing about our family history unless there is an expectation that our
living relatives will want to read it. Indeed, some you may feel that your
family stories are so interesting that they deserve a wider audience - over the
years I've published some wonderful articles written by members. For the
general reader these help to breathe life into a subject that they might
consider rather dull (or at least, would have done before Who Do You Think You Are? launched in October 2004).
But how will family historians of the
future interpret what you've written? Will they know that you've embellished
the facts in order to make the story more interesting and, if so, how are they
supposed to tell proven facts from plausible fiction.
Are you in danger of turning family
history into family mystery?
One of the topics we’re going to be
discussing in Portugal next month is the Genealogical
Proof Standard. There are five key elements:
I'm not going to prejudge the outcome of
the debate, which I'll be reporting on in a future newsletter, but I'd like to draw
your attention to the final two elements, as in judging the entries for the challenge
in the last newsletter I noticed that quite a few of the entrants didn't even
mention evidence that contradicted their conclusion. To be fair, I didn't ask
them to do this, and in most cases they had the right answer - but it got me
thinking about the more general issue.
The fact is, it's very tempting to
ignore contradictory evidence - as anyone who listens to politicians or reads
about miscarriages of justice will know - but since we
as family historians are cheating ourselves when we twist the evidence to fit a
particular version of events it seems a pretty futile exercise. Perhaps there's
a conflict between the psychological need to finish what we're doing (so that
we can move onto something else), and the imperative for family historians to
keep an open mind until the evidence eventually becomes so overwhelming that
there can be only one answer.
When you're trying to explain something
that your ancestors did or didn't do, don't stop at the first plausible
explanation. It might be right, but it might not, and if you gamble everything
on your guess being right you could lose the lot (for example, if you end up
tracing the wrong line).
The feedback I've had from members who
took up the challenge in my last newsletter has been very positive - for
example, Leonie wrote that "I have found this journey really entertaining",
Sally commented "Great fun", and Alison said "What a great
challenge!".
To encourage more of you to exercise
your undoubted skills on a real humdinger of a challenge I'm adding some extra
prizes. Mary has already won the prize for the first correct entry, but I also
offered a free LostCousins subscription for the person who submitted the best
entry.
I've now decided that instead of a
single prize for the best entry I'm going to give out up to TEN subscriptions.
Five of these will go to current LostCousins members
who submit the best entries, but five will be reserved for new members (ie members who join on or after the date of this
newsletter), so you might want to publicise the challenge to the family history
societies, online forums, and Facebook groups to which you belong.
It's a great opportunity to prove that
you've "got what it takes" - not so much to me, but to yourself! All
the information you need can be found here,
and you've got until Monday 16th March to send in your entry.
Using Y-DNA to verify your
research
DNA testing isn't something you should
only consider when you want to knock down 'brick walls' - it can also provide
you with a means of verifying that your research is correct.
In the simplest case you (or a male
relative) might take a Y-DNA test. You would expect that at least some of the
matches you get are with people who have the same surname (since Y-DNA is
passed down the male line), and most of the time that's what will happen.
But what if the most common surname on
your list of matches is a different one entirely? This could indicate a
Non-Paternal Event (NPE), ie one of the ancestors in
your direct paternal line was adopted, or illegitimate, or the product of an
extra-marital liaison (it's rather like the recent discovery that King Richard
III's Y-DNA didn't match that of the descendants of John of Gaunt.). This
doesn't mean that the research you've carried out is wrong, because the NPE
could have been many generations ago, but it should set alarm bells ringing.
At this point you should consider asking
a distant cousin who bears the same surname to test. If their Y-DNA is a close
match for yours, this confirms that the NPE did not occur in the generations since
your nearest common ancestor. It also confirms that your research back to that
point is correct - so the more distant the cousin the better.
Of course, you might instead discover
that your distant cousin's Y-DNA isn't
a match for your own. In this case, the next thing to ask is whether he is
getting matches with people who bear his surname - if so,
this suggests that there is a NPE in your
line of descent from the supposed common ancestor, or that there is an error in
your research back to that point.
Note:
my cousins and I tested with Family Tree
DNA, who have the world's largest database of
genealogical Y-DNA results.
Verifying your research
using autosomal DNA
When I wrote about autosomal DNA testing
last June I described it as the 'lucky dip' of DNA tests - because you simply
can't predict what you'll discover.
Autosomal DNA (atDNA)
is inherited from both parents, who inherited it from their parents and so on.
At each generation roughly half of the DNA passed on comes from each parent,
and so if you look back 10 generations just under 0.1% (on average) of your DNA
has been inherited from each of your 1024 8G grandparents.
However, in practice you won't have
received inherited DNA from every ancestor, and the further you go back the
less likely it is that you've inherited any detectable DNA from a given
ancestor.
But that doesn't mean that atDNA tests are useless - far from it. The pattern of
inheritance means that when we get a match the common ancestor could be in any
part of our tree, not just in our direct paternal line, and whilst it might not
be possible to look back many generations, most of us have unresolved puzzles within
the last 5 or 6 generations (I certainly do!).
When you get a match with a distant
cousin you already know it helps to verify the research that you've both
carried out - as far back as your nearest common ancestor(s). However the fact that
you don't get a match with a distant cousin doesn't have the same negative
connotations, because you will have inherited different parts of your DNA from
the ancestor(s) your share, and it's quite feasible
that there won't be any overlap.
Of course, when you test your atDNA you'll also get matches with cousins you don't know -
but that's a story for another day.
Note:
I tested with Family
Tree DNA because their database has more results from Europe than any other
testing company - and if you live in the UK their Family Finder test is by far
the cheapest option.
Analysing old family photographs
I mentioned earlier this month that
Jacqueline was very pleased with the analysis carried out by 'photo detective' Jayne Shrimpton,
and in view of the positive response from readers I asked Jacqueline to write
an article about her experience:
I have long considered sending my photos to an expert but never got round to it and a recent special offer by Findmypast to its annual subscribers of 15% off Jayne's service finally galvanised me into action. I already knew the photos to be of my 2x great grandparents, Henry James Sweeting, born in Bethnal Green, East London, in 1836 and his second wife, Elizabeth Donne, born in Greenhithe, Kent in 1835. They married in 1860 in Westminster; Elizabeth died in 1911 and Henry in 1930. Although they look like a pair, they are clearly not, since the vignette style 3/4 poses show Elizabeth standing facing slightly to her right and Henry sitting astride a chair with his arms resting on the back, also facing slightly right. Henry rose from poverty in a silversmith's family to become a successful business man in Camberwell and the photos appear to be of them in early middle age. Although they are in identical high quality mounts, there is no photographer's identification on them except that they both have the same number written in pencil on the backs. Over the years, I have cut out experts' photo datings from family history magazines and assembled a fairly formidable "encyclopaedia", and bought several books of dating historical and family photos, but I was not satisfied with my conclusions; I also took them in to the /Gallery of English Costume/ in Manchester for the opinion of a curator. I was lucky to catch a young man who off the top of his head, said they were probably from the 1870s. However, I was still puzzled by the dates of the two because Elizabeth's hat seemed to be of a short lived style from the early to mid '80s, and I also wondered why they were taken at all since they were high quality studies of a married couple but not taken together.
Well, it seemed to be easy for Jayne who almost by return of email sent me a side and a half of A4. She opened the report by looking at the photos together. She said "Your large photographic prints on substantial mounts were not a common format used for original photographs, but they do exemplify the manner in which photographic reprints and enlargements were commonly presented."
She went on to say that photos could be copied and enlarged and mounted in such a way as to form "significant portraits suitable for displaying" in frames or for hanging. "Apart from the generous dimensions of the mounts, one sign of copies...was that often the portraits were given an artistic vignette treatment," the central image fading out around the edges.
She went on to explain why this might happen. Sometimes a pair of reprints "would be ordered because one or both of the subjects had died and the new pictures became special 'memorial portraits', by which family members could remember the deceased." The style of the card mounts suggested the early c20th. They could have been made following Elizabeth's death in 1911 by Henry or one of their children. She said that in such a case "the original photographs ... did not necessarily have to be a matching pair...Sometimes the 'best' surviving likenesses of a man and a woman might be used." So that was a very plausible reason for the "why?"
She then went on to examine the photos separately; they may have been, but were not necessarily, taken at the same studio at a similar, but not the same time. Very likely; they lived in Camberwell, not far from Peckham Rye for some 20 odd years once Henry began to make his way. Jayne said that "men's appearance can be hard to date very closely from fashion clues" since their suits "were essentially rather uniform" but she looked at the style of the pose, his beard, and the collar of his lounge jacket to come up with a date of c 1876-1884.
"When a married person visited the studio alone for a single portrait, usually they were celebrating a personal occasion, such as a landmark birthday." She judged him to "be aged about 40 or thereabouts" in the photo. Henry was 40 in 1876. Elizabeth's pose is typical of the 1870s and '80s, as is the seat used as a studio prop. Her daytime costume was of a style called "/cuirass/ ... developed in 1874/5, continuing in an increasingly extreme form into the early 1880s. This would suggest a date range of 1875-79" for the original. As for the hat which fooled me as to the date of the original, it goes to show that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing! It was not a hat at all but "the ornate day cap of a married woman, still considered an important accessory for mature women in the mid-Victorian era." Jayne concluded that she too was probably celebrating a personal occasion and she too looked to be "aged 40 or so". This fits in well with Jayne's dating of 1875-9 since Elizabeth was 40 in 1875 - "her milestone birthday." These were the probable answers to "when?"
This report answered all my questions in a very satisfactory way; no amount of poring over my personal and online images could have done it for me. And it all cost just a little more than a BMD certificate, with the benefit of a very friendly "after-sales service".
You'll find full details of Jaynes Shrimpton's services and pricing if you follow this link.
Church graffiti reveals
plague victims
This BBC News article
tells how names scratched on a church wall identifies three Cambridgeshire
sisters who are thought to have perished in the plague of 1515 (it predates the
introduction of parish registers in 1538).
The inscription was found by volunteers
from the Norfolk and Suffolk Medieval Graffiti Survey (goodness knows what they
were doing in Cambridgeshire). I wonder what else we might discover from graffiti?
Did rats really cause
the Black Death?
Another BBC article suggests
that the spread of plague across Europe was caused not by black rats, as
previously assumed, but by gerbils from Asia. Analysis of tree rings has shown
that there is no relationship between the weather in Europe and the timing of
outbreaks - which would have been expected if rats were the primary cause. The
next step is to analyse plague DNA recovered from the remains of victims.
As a result of famine and plague the
population of England fell by between one-third and one-half during the
mid-14th century, and didn't recover until the 16th century.
I often get emails from members asking
how they ought to organise their research, and as I haven't written about this
topic since 2010, I thought I'd briefly summarise what I do:
I have two parallel sets of records,
written records and digital records. Any unique documents that come into my
possession, for example photographs or original certificates, are scanned in -
just in case something happens to the original. When I find a household on any
of the censuses I save the image on my hard drive, then
load it into Irfanview where I trim off the margins and adjust the brightness
and contrast before printing it out.
The folders on my hard drive closely
emulate the files in my filing cabinet - I have a folder for each of my
ancestral lines (ie one for each surname borne by a
direct ancestor), and within that main folder I have subfolders for the
collateral lines that I've researched in the most detail.
I'm not suggesting that what I do is the
best way to organise your records, and it's certainly not the only way - but it
has worked well for me for well over a decade, so it might work for you too.
More than 400 years ago Shakespeare
questioned whether names are important, but I think it's fair to say that they
still are, especially if you're a horse called Brian.
Brian was training to become a police
horse, but a police spokeswoman said the mounted section tended to give their
horses "god or war-related names, such as Odin, Thor or Hercules" -
this BBC News story
tells of the outcry that ensued.
When we're researching our family
history we tend to assume that the names by which we know our ancestors are the
ones that we'll find in official records, in parish registers, and on censuses
- but usually we'll be wrong.
Meet Jefferson Tayte
How can you meet someone who only exists
in the pages of Steve Robinson's genealogical mysteries - it sounds impossible,
doesn't it?
In fact the answer is simple - you need
to be in the story! And you can do just that if you win the charity auction that's
currently taking place on eBay (you'll find it here).
The auction ends on 8th March, so don't delay - I've already placed my bid!
It's a very good cause - the proceeds go to CLIC Sargent, the charity that
helps children with cancer (it was one of the charities I chose to benefit from
donations when my father died).
Note:
although I've never featured in a novel myself (yet) the fictional genealogist
Morton Farrier did use the LostCousins website to crack his last case - see this
article
from December.
I've had a really bad cold for the past
10 days, so I've used this as an opportunity to catch up on my reading and do
some of the accounting and filing that I'd normally leave (and leave, and
leave). The one book I was able to read from beginning to end was The
Surnames Handbook, by Debbie Kennett (who will be telling us all about
DNA in Portugal next month).
You might think, from the name, that
it's a dictionary of surnames - but it's actually much more useful than that. Debbie
reviews the existing literature on surname origins (she certainly doesn't hold back
from criticism - or praise), then tackles the issues that we need to consider
if we are going to research the bearers of our own surname, even if it doesn't
blossom into a full one-name study. For example, she surveys the pre-1600 resources
that are available to us - and points out that there are only two English
families which can reliably trace their descent in the male line before the
Norman Conquest.
I came away realising that there were
parts of my tree which would benefit from a different approach - where there
are rare surnames which may have a single origin I could start from the
earliest recorded instances and work forwards, rather than always working
backwards.
For example, the earliest recorded
English bearer of the surname Vandepere was a
carpenter called Launcelot, who worked in Canterbury
in the mid-16th century (and seems to have been a freeman of that city). I
haven't been able to make a connection between him, and my earliest Vandepere ancestor, who lived a century later, but by
working forwards from Launcelot as well as backwards
from my John I'm going to have a much greater chance of success.
The
Surnames Handbook is available as
a paperback or as a Kindle book - and it's absolutely crammed with information,
links, references, and useful advice. I wouldn't describe it as light reading,
but the best books on family history never are: buy it, read it, and keep it
handy!
How long does your PC take
to boot?
There was a time when I'd have time to
make a cup of coffee while my PC booted up, but these days I barely have time
to blink. Since I replaced my hard drive with a solid-state drive it boots up
in about 20 seconds - and I now use the original hard drive for backups.
By the way, it's not simply quicker to
start up - everything seems to be faster - and whilst solid-state drives are
more expensive to buy, because they don't have moving parts they're said to be more
reliable and longer-lasting.
Right now you can buy the same SSD for about
the same as I paid at Amazon
or, for a little bit more, direct from the manufacturer.
It comes with an OEM version
of Acronis True Image to clone your old hard drive to the SSD, and this works
even if the drives are different capacities. In my case I went from a 1TB hard
drive to a 512GB SSD, which wasn't a problem because I'd only used 386GB.
Just one tip this time - go back to the
beginning of the newsletter and glance through the articles you skipped the
first time!
This week I confirmed something that I'd
suspected for some time - that some readers of this newsletter cherry-pick the
articles, not realising that there are often hidden nuggets (the titles aren't
always an accurate guide to the contents). And please don't make the mistake of
assuming you know it all, because none of us does - not you, and certainly not
me.
This is where I'll post any last minute
additions.
Next time you hear from me I'll probably
be at Genealogy in the Sunshine -
wish me luck!
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2015 Peter Calver
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