Newsletter
- 17th June 2016
6
million more Norfolk parish records at The Genealogist JUST RELEASED
Save £20 on a Diamond subscription
Ancestry
add 12 million Gloucestershire records BREAKING
NEWS
Parish
registers: all change in 1813
More
Irish court records at Findmypast
Arthur
Daly: adulterer, perjurer, or murderer?
Explore
the British Newspaper Archive for half-price
Scotland's
Register of Corrected Entries
More DNA
discounts ENDS MONDAY
Dietary
preferences and genealogy
Review: Tracing Your Kent Ancestors
Get
hold of your medical records - it's easy!
The LostCousins newsletter is usually
published fortnightly. To access the previous newsletter (dated 10th June)
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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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!
6 million more Norfolk
parish records at The Genealogist JUST RELEASED
There are now almost 10 million Norfolk
parish records at The Genealogist, all accompanied by images of the register
entries - the records include the baptisms of Great War martyr Edith Cavell and
naval hero Horatio Nelson:
This week 6.23 million records were
added to the existing collection, including over a quarter of a million records
for Suffolk parishes which border Norfolk.
The Genealogist also has Tithe
Records and Tithe Maps covering 40 counties (initially in black and white
the maps are being rescanned in colour), the biggest collection of transcribed
parish register entries for Essex (a county very close to my heart), and an
amazing collection of Non-Conformist
and Non-Parochial records which are held by the National Archives.
Note:
if you're not familiar with tithe records this research
guide at the National Archives site will prove very useful.
Save £20 on a
Diamond subscription to The Genealogist
Good news! I've negotiated a discount
for LostCousins members on Diamond subscriptions, which provide access to all
of the records at The Genealogist - and you'll also get a free subscription
(worth £24.99) to the digital edition of Discover Your Ancestors
magazine.
To take advantage of
the offer please follow this link.
Tip:
one of the powerful features of The Genealogist is the ability to search for a family using forenames alone - you can find out more
about the 'Family Search' here.
Ancestry add 12 million
Gloucestershire records BREAKING
NEWS
Ancestry have just added prison records, electoral registers, and
Land Tax records for Gloucestershire - a total of more than 12 million records
in all. These records are so new that (as I write) they're not included in the
Card Catalogue, so to find them you'll probably need to use these links:
Gloucestershire
Prision Records, 1728-1914
Gloucestershire
Electoral Registers 1832-1974
Gloucestershire
Land Tax Records 1713-1833
More Irish court records
at Findmypast
This week Findmypast added a further
547,000 records from Irish Petty Sessions Court Registers - there are now more
than 22 million in all, covering the period 1828-1912. You can search the
entire collection here.
Parish registers: all
change in 1813
As anyone who has ploughed through
parish registers from the 18th century or earlier will know, the introduction
of printed baptism and burial registers in 1813 is a great boon for
genealogists, but it could have been so much better, as this article from
Gwyneth Wilkie explains:
ROSE’S ACT OF 1812: WAS IT A SUCCESS?
Peter has asked me
to provide a synopsis of my article on this subject which appeared in the Genealogists’ Magazine, Vol 32, no 2,
June 2016, pp 48-57. The short format necessitates concentrating on conclusions
rather than the supporting evidence.
Family historians
mostly welcome the printed baptism and burial registers which were introduced
from 1813. They are usually easier to read than earlier freeform versions.
Numbered entries are easier to find again. We talk not of ‘52 Geo. III, c.146’,
but of ‘Rose’s Act’. It is easy to assume both that the Act was a great
improvement and a significant achievement for Rose.
Yet the obituaries
composed in 1818, some of which include detailed accounts of Rose’s political
career, make no mention of it, nor does his entry in the 2004 Dictionary of National Biography. Why?
George Rose told
the House in February 1812 that parish registers ‘were being kept in a very
slovenly manner in the dwelling of the parish clerk and he had found, as
Treasurer of the navy, numberless instances of the widows of seamen who, from
this culpable negligence, were not able to prove their marriages.’ Early in his
career he had made his mark as an excellent administrator, banishing muddle by
devising systems which allowed any document to be swiftly located.
In his desire for
justice and efficiency he made proposals which outraged the clergy. They were
incensed to the point of holding protest meetings and writing pamphlets
denouncing his early proposals. The notion of being ordered to submit their
registers to a magistrate every year and swear to their accuracy deeply
offended them, especially as Dissenting Ministers would not have to take a
similar oath. They would not be allowed to retain registers over a year old,
and thus would lose all income from searches. One pamphleteer described this as
‘actual robbery’. The implied insult also rankled.
The Bill was toned down and trimmed. Columns which would have recorded
the birthdates and birthplaces of the parents of a baptised child (and much
else) disappeared from the example registers. Anyone wanting to understand what
happened in Parliament or to know more about the pamphlets attacking Rose’s
projected reforms should refer to the very revealing article by Stuart Basten (you'll find a PDF version here);
it includes examples showing how much more informative baptism and burial
entries would have been if only Rose's original proposals had been enacted.
At the final reading in the House of Lords, where the Bishops sat, the
Bill underwent drastic revision. With the Parliamentary session about to end,
Rose had to choose between enacting a very different Bill or
dropping it altogether. The Law Magazine
mused that it was called Rose’s Act ‘with cruel injustice to that gentleman’s
reputation…….sometimes….the act passed [is] as unlike the bill introduced as
the living ass is unlike the Bologna sausage.’
Some aims were
achieved. Printed and numbered registers were mandatory, but captured far less
data than had been intended. Some clergymen added the date of birth alongside
baptism and some the mother’s maiden name (although in fact even Rose's
original proposals didn't include the latter). The richly informative Dade and
Barrington registers could no longer be used.
Rose wanted
registers to be securely stored in an iron chest, many of which still survive.
Previously Bishop’s Transcripts had been handed over by parish officials every
year, on unbound sheets, at the time of the Archdeacon’s visitation. Now they
were to go post-free if correctly addressed. Too often they were not sent or
wrongly superscribed. The Diocesan Registrar would
refuse to pay the postage, and in London many were eventually burnt. York
reported that ‘one-fourth are returned, because liable to postage or sent as
parcels’ when the Ecclesiastical Commissioners in 1831 enquired how certain
clauses in Rose’s Bill were being observed. So Rose’s vision of central
repositories in which registers were kept safe from fire and comprehensively
indexed did not come to fruition. No money was voted for new buildings or extra
staff, despite the provision in the Act for this to be decided within a year of
the legislation coming into force. Bishop’s Transcripts, no longer produced
under the compelling eye of the Archdeacon, were fewer than before.
The reactions of
the clergy to Rose’s well-meant reforms were no doubt exacerbated by their
awareness of how the church had suffered at the hands of the state during the
Civil War. Collecting Stamp Duty from reluctant parishioners from 1783 to 1794
probably left a lasting distaste for having to act as government functionaries.
This clash influenced the Select Committee on Parochial Registration in 1833,
whose report led to civil registration.
We can now see why
the 1812 Act did not rank as his finest achievement!
Tip:
Gwyneth will be speaking on this topic to the Buckinghamshire Family History
Society in Aylesbury tomorrow (Saturday 18th June). Visitors are welcome - you
can find more details here.
Last month there was an opportunity for
non-subscribers to try out the Hints that Findmypast provide when you upload a
family tree, and whilst the high-level of interest did result in some
frustrating (and sometimes confusing) delays for many users, Barry in Australia
made a very important discovery about one of his ancestors:
"Just writing to say
thanks for the newsletters and letting us know about the free hints on
findmypast a couple of weeks ago. I copied my tree on there and found quite a
lot of hints - some of which I already knew but the best was I found out that
my great-great grandfather died in New York in 1859 and a link to the New York
Herald on line for free revealed an entry in births, marriages, and deaths
giving date of death and time of funeral and his NY address. I'm still trying
to find where he was buried.
"He was English and he
was married in Kent in 1850 and they went to New York straight after the
wedding. They had 3 children there - no birth records unfortunately - one of whom
was my great grandmother. Although he went to the US as a farmer, he was listed
in the 1855 census as a 'speculator' - still trying to find out what this
means! His wife and 3 children were back in Kent with her father in the 1861
census. There were always theories in the family that he went off to fight in
the American Civil War but this [discovery] laid that to rest."
Note:
the American Civil War was fought between 1861-65.
Arthur Daly: adulterer,
perjurer, or murderer?
I was so impressed by the entries
submitted for my New Year challenge that I decided to continue researching this
case myself, eventually stumbling on a stunning
revelation that shed a new light on the events and the evidence that the jury
heard when Dr Daly was tried for murder.
First can I suggest you recap by
re-reading my articles from the 31st December newsletter, which you'll find here. Like all good researchers you should keep an open mind -
evidence is not always what it first appears.
A key piece of evidence that I missed
was provided by Lynne, who looked - as I had done - for children born to Daly
and his wife Lilian (née Ratcliff), and like me found three sons, two born
before the court case and one afterwards:
But what I hadn't noticed was this entry
in the death indexes:
And, even more importantly, I hadn't
spotted this one:
This was clearly the same child - so
what could explain the fact that he was known by the surname Vinning? Surely the only reasonable explanation is that he
was the child of Daly's mistress, and not his wife - in which case whoever
registered the birth committed perjury?
As you can imagine, by this time my
imagination was in overdrive. Had this child died a natural death, or was Miss Vinning just very unlucky? I re-read all the newspaper
reports, and found myself focusing on the caravan in which the body of a
new-born child had been found in 1939. According to evidence given at Daly's
trial for murder, and reported in The Nottingham Evening Post on 28th February
1940, the caravan was in the field of a farmer named Chamberlain:
Image © Local World
Limited/Trinity Mirror. Image
created courtesy of THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD and used by kind permission of
Findmypast
But it wasn't as simple as that - an
article in the same newspaper on 5th December 1939 recorded that the caravan
had been rented not from the farmer, but from a Mrs Gladys Barton:
Image © Local World
Limited/Trinity Mirror. Image
created courtesy of THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD and used by kind permission of
Findmypast
And there I
might have let the investigation lapse, had I not thought to find out a little
more about Mrs Barton, starting with her entry in the 1939 Register:
© Crown Copyright Image reproduced by courtesy of The National Archives,
London, England and Findmypast
As you can see, Mrs Barton was shown as
married on 29th September 1939, yet there was no sign of her husband. A further
search at the British Newspaper Archive revealed why:
Image © Local World
Limited/Trinity Mirror. Image
created courtesy of THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD and used by kind permission of
Findmypast
This article appeared on 13th October
1939, just a month before the body of a new-born child was discovered in her
caravan. At this point I thought back to the evidence given at Daly's trial by
Miss Vinning and her mother - supposedly neither of
them had realised that Dorothy was pregnant. Is that really believable?
What if she hadn't been pregnant at all, and it was someone else's baby that had been found in
the caravan? I'll leave you to continue
the investigations, and if you don't already have access to the British
Newspaper Archive via a Findmypast subscription, the offer below will help.
Explore the British
Newspaper Archive for half-price
I've arranged a half-price offer at the
British Newspaper Archive - until the end of June you can buy a 1 month
subscription at half-price when you follow this link and use
the code JUNE50A
Note:
at the end of the first month your subscription will be renewed automatically
at the full price unless you untick the 'Auto-renew my subscription' box
on the 'Personal details' page of 'My Account'. You can do this at any time, so
don't leave it until the last minute!
The British Newspaper Archive is
expanding fast - this month alone nearly 3 million articles have been added,
from 17 newspapers, including 13 new titles. You can see more details here - one of the titles added is the Suffolk and Essex Free Press, where the
death of my great-great grandmother's sister was reported on 24th June 1891,
the day of her funeral.
Image © THE BRITISH LIBRARY BOARD and
used by kind permission of Findmypast
My great-great-great aunt was married to
my great-great-great uncle - by which I mean that her husband was my
great-great grandfather's brother. This means that their descendants share
twice as much DNA with me as would normally be the case for 4th cousins - this
is something to bear in mind when you're considering which cousins to test.
I found another interesting article when
flicking through the pages of the Suffolk
and Essex Free Press - on 21st February 1900 the newspaper reported that
the last of Napoleon's soldiers in recipient of a pension had died, aged 105.
Scotland's Register of
Corrected Entries
Scotland's system of civil registration
is different from - and arguably much better than - the English system, and one of the differences is the Register of Corrected
Entries. Recently ScotlandsPeople published a helpful guide to this register,
which shows many examples - you can find it here.
Earlier this month Findmypast added
870,000 deaths from the Australian state of Queensland which cover the period
1829-1964. You can search them here.
Birth, death, and marriage indexes for Queensland
can also be searched free
here at the Queensland Government website.
More DNA discounts ENDS MONDAY
With Father's Day approaching Family
Tree DNA are offering discounts on bundles of DNA tests for males - you can get
a 37 marker Y-DNA test and a Family Finder (autosomal) test for $218, a
$50 discount (as usual you'll pay $12.95 shipping on top). For a UK customer
the total cost will be around £165, less than you would have paid for a single
test a few years ago.
Tip:
you'll be supporting LostCousins when you use this link to
place your order
Family Tree DNA are
the only company of the big three to offer Y-DNA tests, and they have by far
the largest database of results. Of course, Y-DNA can only tell you about a
single line - the one that goes up the left-hand side of your tree - but by
combining the test with a Family Finder test you arguably get the best of both
worlds. (See my previous articles for a discussion of the pros and cons of the
different tests - you'll find the most recent one here.)
You've only got until Monday 20th June
to place your order if you want to secure the discounted price, so if you're
planning to ask a family member to test, get on the phone to them now!
Note:
the offer in my last newsletter for discounted autosomal DNA tests at Ancestry
expires on Sunday 19th June - follow this link
for more details.
Dietary preferences and
genealogy
If you were and a cousin were going to
meet up at a restaurant you'd want to make sure that the restaurant served food
that both of you could eat - for example, if your cousin is vegetarian, you
wouldn't choose somewhere that only served meat. Indeed, you might even choose
to go to a restaurant that only
served vegetarian food - after all, it won't do you any harm!
It's much the same with genealogy - if
you want to connect with as many as possible of your cousins you have to accept
that their preferences might be
different from yours. For example, some will be wary of publishing information
online, so are far more likely to be found at a site like LostCousins than one
like Ancestry - indeed, the more experienced they are, the more likely it is
that you'll only find them at
LostCousins.
So, if you are interested in linking up
with the most experienced researchers in your extended family, don't assume
that you're going to find them through Ancestry - and this applies whether your
own tree is public or private.
Short of time (or simply lazy)? Well, it's
true that completing your My Ancestors
page will take a little longer than uploading a GEDCOM file, but what you
probably don't realise is that because the automated matching at LostCousins is
far more accurate and more informative, and the connections you make will be
more valuable, you'll actually save time by using LostCousins.
Review: Tracing Your Kent Ancestors
David Wright is a professional
genealogist who is an expert on Kent - he has been working with the various
archives for 35 years - so few, if any, can be better-qualified to write a book
entitled Tracing
Your Kent Ancestors.
Over 2300 LostCousins members have
entered direct ancestors who were living in Kent in 1881, and there must be
many more with connections to the county who haven't yet completed their my Ancestors page, or who ancestors left
before 1881 (as mine did). But although this book is unlikely to be bought by
anyone who doesn't have Kent ancestry), you shouldn't make the mistake of
assuming that it’s only going to help with your Kent lines, because many of the
resources he describes in detail are national (eg
censuses), or have equivalents in other parts of England (eg
probate records).
However (within England) the gavelkind system of holding
land is unique to Kent - this required land to be divided equally between
surviving sons irrespective of their father's wishes (it wasn't finally
outlawed until 1925).
Many of my Kent ancestors of the early
18th century were baptised or married at Whitstable, on the coast about 7 miles
north of Canterbury, so I was interested to discover that the turnpike road
from Canterbury from Whitstable was one of the first to open, in 1736
(Whitstable was linked to London by sea, so it was an important trade route). A
century later, one of the country's very first railway lines was built between
Whitstable and Canterbury (it opened in 1830), but it was commercially
unsuccessful - I'm sure it’s only a coincidence that by this time my ancestors
had migrated to London!
My only criticisms of Dr Wright's book
are the lack of an index to the places mentioned (although there is a gazetteer
showing where the records for each parish are held) - and the inadvertent ennoblement
of George Rose (on page 61 there is a reference to Lord Rose's Act). Otherwise
it's an excellent guide to the resources that can help us trace our Kent
ancestors - I wish I'd had a copy of this book a few years ago!
Tip:
there are discounted copies on sale at Amazon (follow this link and look for the prices shown in blue
under the main pricing box).
When I wrote last month about my
peripheral neuropathy I don't suppose most of you, or indeed most of the
population, had ever heard of the affliction. So whilst I was very sad to hear
that Eric Clapton is also a sufferer (although the symptoms described in this
Daily Mail article
the symptoms sound more like sciatica - which I have also suffered from in the
past), perhaps increased awareness might eventually lead to a cure.
Note:
for the benefit of younger readers I should explain that Eric Clapton is a 60s
rock star who was in bands you probably haven't heard of either, including The Yardbirds, John Mayall, Cream,
and Blind Faith.
Peripheral neuropathy affects almost 1
in 10 of over-55s to a lesser or greater extent, according to this NHS page,
yet I'd never heard the term until I was unexpectedly diagnosed in April. It's
a shame my GP didn't warn me when I reported the first minor symptoms in 2008,
as I might have made some different lifestyle choices.
Get hold of your
medical records - it's easy!
I'd been planning to get a copy of my
medical records from my GP for many years, but it was only a couple of weeks
ago, that I eventually did anything about it. The catalyst was my appointment -
this coming Monday - for a series of tests to investigate my neuropathy, but as
a family historian I wanted to see what there was in my records about my
childhood illnesses.
Getting hold of the records was
surprisingly easy - I emailed the practice manager, explaining why I wanted a
copy of my records, and just a couple of days later I got a phone call to say
that they were ready to collect! The cost was £32, which might sound a lot for
40 sheets of A4 paper, but to me the information was priceless. I now know the
precise dates in 1954 when I broke my femur, and in 1977 when I fractured two
vertebrae in my lower spine.
Surprisingly there was nothing in my
file about the scarlet fever I contracted in 1956, perhaps because the records
were retained by Ilford Isolation Hospital, which was very close to where I was
living at the time. I'm currently trying to track down where the hospital
records have ended up - if they haven't been destroyed, that is. (The National
Archives has a research
guide for hospitals that you might find useful.)
This week I bit the bullet and switched our
broadband and phone from BT, who we've always been with, to Sky. There have
been some attractive offers before, but this time I simply couldn't resist: Sky
were offering free unlimited broadband for a year,
half-price line rental for a year, and a £50 bill credit. Although I
negotiated BT down a year ago this still represents a saving of around £200
over the course of a year, a very useful sum indeed.
Whilst my new Sky service hasn't started
we've already got access to Sky email, so we have taken the opportunity to get
everything set up and working - now all I'm waiting for is our shiny new Sky
router to arrive (I paid an extra £20 for the new model - the basic router was
as outdated as our BT HomeHub), and for everything to
switch over, hopefully seamlessly, at the end of the month.
Of course BT weren't happy about our
leaving - they offered a further discount on broadband, but an extra £2 a month
off simply wasn't enough to make me change my mind. I was a little saddened,
however, to get an almost threatening email from them, which stated:
Yes, we had paid a year advance, but it
was due to run out a few days before the changeover - and, in any case, it was
paid in respect of our other phone line (the one that my wife uses for her
practice), and this will be staying with BT. No wonder BT aren't renowned for
their customer service according to the latest Which? survey! Admittedly Sky don't come out much better in
the survey, but so far Sky haven't accused me of lying, unlike a BT manager I
spoke to a couple of years ago.
Note:
in case you're concerned on my behalf, our BT8500 call-blocking phones will still work after
the switch; in fact I've just ordered an extra handset.
Talking of Which? surveys, I noticed last month that GiffGaff,
the network I use and recommend, was once again voted the best mobile provider
in the UK by users. One feature that I value is the free calling between
GiffGaff users - because my wife is on GiffGaff too - but I also like the
friendliness and the flexibility (most of the support is provided by other
users). You can get a free sim and a £5 bonus on your first top-up if you
follow this link.
I think I mentioned in a previous
newsletter that my wife and I no longer make phone calls using our landlines -
we use our mobiles instead. Previously we paid £7.95 a month to BT - now our
calls don't cost us a penny (because they come out of our GiffGaff allowance).
It's funny, isn't it - for a long time it was far more expensive to make calls
from mobiles, but for many of us it has gone round the other way!
I know many of you enjoyed the Lambeth
Walk spoof which so annoyed Hitler, so here is some more old footage, this time
from just after the war when television transmissions resumed. Television Is Here Again
was a demonstration film used by television installers - there are 8 parts in
all, and you'll find links to the other 7 if you scroll down and click Show More. I hope you enjoy it!
Finally, I went round to our local
auctions rooms last week to see one of the items for sale - a wonderful collection
of autographs, mostly of people in show business: Walt Disney, Harpo Marx,
Douglas Fairbanks senior, Marlene Dietrich, Lloyd George, Rachmaninov, Ivor Novello, Irving Berlin, Ivor Novello,
Noel Coward, Agatha Christie and many more. They had been collected by Richard
Hearne, who was better known (to me, at least) as Mr Pastry. You can see a few
of the autographs here
- I only wish I could have bought them!
This is where any last minute updates
and corrections will be highlighted - if you think you've spotted an error
(sadly I'm not infallible), reload the newsletter (press Ctrl-F5) then check here before writing to me, in case
someone else has beaten you to it......
That's all for now - I hope you've found
something to help, amuse, or challenge you!
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2016 Peter Calver
Please
do not copy any part of this newsletter without permission. However, you MAY
link to this newsletter or email a link to your friends and relatives without
asking for permission in advance - though why not invite them to join
LostCousins instead as standard membership, which includes this newsletter, is
FREE?