Newsletter
- 7th November 2015
Free
Military records at Ancestry.co.uk ENDS WEDNESDAY
CHALLENGE:
can you find the missing marriage?
Save
on Findmypast credits ENDS FRIDAY
1939
Register: the story so far
Two-thirds
full or one-third empty?
Canada
reinstates 'long form' census
Lord Lucan's death certificate to be issued - 41 years late?
Family
burial vault discovered by accident
The LostCousins newsletter is usually published
fortnightly. To access the previous newsletter (dated 31st October) click here, for an index to articles from 2009-10 click here, for a list of articles from 2011
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Free Military records
at Ancestry.co.uk ENDS
WEDNESDAY
Until Armistice Day, 11th November, you
can search and view hundreds of millions of military records completely free at
Ancestry.co.uk
- so it's a great opportunity for me to repeat the challenge I posed in
February....
CHALLENGE:
can you find the missing marriage?
When we think of war cemeteries we think
of poppies and neat rows of stone crosses - but it wasn't always like that, as
you can see from the photo that Miriam sent of her great uncle's grave:
"My grandmother's brother
Christopher (Kit) Bowman fought with the 9th Durhams
in WW1 and died in June 1915 aged 23. I had often wondered whether he had
married before he went to war but couldn't prove it. Your link to WW1
Soldiers' Effects on a free Ancestry weekend was the perfect combination
and I went straight to look - and there he was or, rather, there was the name
of his widow Martha who received £1 2s 6d. I am delighted to have found that
out, but would you believe it I can't find a record of their marriage!"
I could indeed - there are a number of
reasons why a marriage can't be traced, one of the most common being that the
couple didn't actually marry at all!
But even when a marriage did take place
it can be difficult to find - for example, if (unbeknown to us) the bride was a
widow, she would almost certainly have married using
her first husband's surname. However it wasn't a factor on this occasion
because neither Miriam nor I knew what Martha's surname was - or at least, we
didn't when Miriam wrote to me that winter morning. But by the afternoon we
knew just about everything, and that's when I realised what an interesting
challenge this would make for readers of this newsletter.
Your challenge is to discover whether or
not Christopher and Martha married, and provide convincing evidence either way.
I'll give you a little bit of extra information to get you going - Christopher
was born in Gateshead, his mother's maiden name was Armstrong, and on the 1901
Census his age is shown incorrectly as 11. You already know that military
records are the key - make the most of them!
Tip:
whilst the Soldiers' Effects register entry shows C J Bowman, not Christopher
Bowman, it's definitely the right entry as his army number tallies with the one
shown on wooden cross in the photo above. If you have a subscription to
Findmypast it's worth checking the military records there, but it isn't
necessary to solve the challenge.
Have fun - there are no prizes as I've
already used this puzzle before, but if you didn't succeed then, it's a great
time to have another go. Remember, it's only by honing our investigative skills
in this way that we're going to make breakthroughs in our own tree - and if you
can't solve a puzzle like this, with all the pointers I've given you, what
chance are you going to have with those 'brick walls' in your own tree?
Save on Findmypast
credits ENDS FRIDAY
You can save 10% on 300 Findmypast
credits when you take advantage of the offer I've arranged. It's available at
all four of Findmypast's worldwide sites, and when you use the relevant link
below you'll be supporting LostCousins:
Whichever site you choose you can use
the credits to view ANY of Findmypast's worldwide records, including the 1939
Register - simply follow the link and enter the discount code LOSTCOUSINS1939 in
the box for discount codes (not the box for voucher code). This offer
ends at midnight on Friday 13th November - hope you're not superstitious!
Tip:
at current exchange rates credits work out a little bit cheaper at Findmypast's
Australian site than at the other three sites.
With the threat of war looming, the
British Government prepared plans for mass evacuation. During WW1 Germany had
bombed London and other targets using Zeppelin airships (you can read more about
it here),
but now the enemy had modern bombers (over 1000 were operational by September
1939), and the bombing of Guernica in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, had
demonstrated the devastation that could be wrought. Preparations started long
before the war: this form
headed Government Evacuation Scheme
is dated May 1939 - note that mothers were asked if they wanted to go with
their children.
Operation Pied Piper went into action on
1st September 1939, two days before Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime
Minister made his momentous radio broadcast to the nation:
"This
morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final
Note stating that, unless we heard from them by 11 o'clock that they were
prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between
us.
"I have
to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that
consequently this country is at war with Germany."
Children
had assembled in school playgrounds on the morning of 1st September, each with a
luggage tag attached to their coat, and carrying bare necessities: their gas
mask, underwear, pyjamas or nightdress, plimsolls, toothbrush, comb, soap, and
a face flannel. Over half a million children were evacuated from London alone
during September, and my mother - then 13 years old - appears to have been one
of them, because on Registration Day (29th September) she wasn't at home with
my grandparents.
Over the course of just three days
around 1.5 million mothers and children were sent from towns and cities into
the countryside, mostly by train - you might this Southern Railways poster
interesting. However, because bombing raids on cities didn't materialise in the
first few months of the war, many children went back home - over half had
returned by January 1940, despite Government warnings (I
believe my mother was one of them).
There were further waves of evacuation
during 1940, and my mother's school was evacuated to Finnamore
Wood Camp, Marlow, Buckinghamshire on 22nd April - you
can see a photo here
which shows some of the schoolgirls. My mother wasn't amongst them, however -
my grandmother wouldn't allow her to leave home again - and so my mother left
school and spent the duration supporting the war effort, working at the nearby
Ship Carbon factory, which made carbon rods for cinema projectors and
searchlights.
A smaller number of children were
evacuated overseas, a story told in the book Out
of Harm's Way, written by an evacuee - but this programme came to end
when the SS City of Benares was sunk in September 1940, killing most of the
children on board. However some children were evacuated
privately even after this incident.
1939 Register: the
story so far
Worried that the Findmypast site might
be overloaded if I got up a sensible hour, I was up at 4.45am on Monday to
search for my relatives in the 1939 Register - and as I made discovery after
discovery I added information to the unofficial web page I'd set up at 1939Register.info
(I know that a lot of members found it
as exciting to read as I did to write - I don't think I've ever been as popular
on Twitter before!)
Over the past 6 days I've been flooded
with questions from LostCousins members- some wanting to know what they would
find, some wondering why they couldn't see relatives they had expected to find,
some telling me about wonderful discoveries they'd made.
A number of members reported transcription
errors - sadly these are inevitable when the source records are handwritten.
For example, the entry below is for my aunt, who was working as a house maid at
Plaistow Fever Hospital in East London:
© Crown Copyright Image reproduced by
courtesy of The National Archives, London, England and Findmypast
The transcriber recorded her forename as
'Mahon' - and quite correctly, because that's what clearly the enumerator has
written - but her name was really 'Marion' (though we always knew her as
'Min'). Whether the enumerator misread the original schedule we'll never know,
but it's noticeable that the handwriting of the later entries is worse, so it's
possible the enumerator was simply fed up with the mindless task of copying the
information from the schedule in to the register.
But it's not all bad news: some entries
have a lot more information than you might expect - that's because this wasn't
a census, taken at a particular date and then set in stone, it was a working
document. It was still compulsory to carry identity cards until February 1952,
and when the NHS was founded in 1948 the register became the core of the NHS
Central Register.
As a result you'll often see name
changes recorded, usually on marriage. This entry appears a few lines below my
aunt's:
© Crown Copyright Image reproduced by
courtesy of The National Archives, London, England and Findmypast
This tells us that May E Lawson became
Dalrymple on her first marriage (which was in 1951), and Noon on her second
marriage in 1955. She died in 1985, but the record would be open in any case as
she was born in 1904, which is more than 100 years ago.
This extra information has enabled some
people to make ground-breaking discoveries about their relatives - I'll tell
you about a few of them in a moment.
Two-thirds full or
one-third empty?
Several people have complained to me
about the number of closed records - even though I pointed out in my last
newsletter that nearly a third of all the records would be closed at the time
of release.
The reality is that if the 1939 Register
were covered by the 1920 Census Act, which is what the Office for National
Statistics contended when I tried to get access in February 2007 (and confirmed
in their letter of 29th March 2007 - see below) we wouldn't be able to see ANY
of the records before 2040 - which would have meant that many of us never got
to see them.
Fortunately they were wrong in their
contention - and the rest is history, history that was unveiled on Monday.
Under Data Protection legislation it's
illegal to publish personal details relating to living individuals, but the
Information Commissioner has wisely decided that if people were born more than
100 years ago it isn't necessary to prove that they are deceased.
Fortunately we don't only see those
records when we search the 1939 Register - because the register continued to be
used by the NHS until the early 1990s many deaths up to this date were noted,
allowing those records to be opened.
However I haven't noticed any markings
that identify an individual as deceased - when I checked dates shown in the
register against the GRO death indexes they usually didn't correspond. It may
be that there is more information - which we can't see - on the right hand page
of the register, but it's also possible that the death information is kept
separately.
Until April 2008 the NHS Central
Register (which incorporated the 1939 Register) were managed on behalf of the
NHS by the GRO. Indeed, it was this register that the GRO used to operate their
invaluable and innovative service Traceline, which enabled people to connect with lost
relatives:
Sadly this came to an end when the GRO
was transferred from the Office for National Statistics to the Home Office, and
the NHS Information Centre in Leeds took responsibility for the NHS Central
Register.
The National Archives have put in place
a system for opening closed records when satisfactory evidence of the person's
birth is provided - often a death certificate is sufficient, but if they
changed name on marriage or remarriage it might be necessary to provide the
marriage certificate as well. Similarly additional evidence might be requested
in respect of someone with a very common name (although if the date of birth is
shown on the death certificate this shouldn't really be necessary).
Unfortunately the National Archives have
to recover their costs and they have set the charge at £25 per individual,
which is a considerable disincentive.
The good news is that Findmypast
subscribers who have a 12 month Britain or World subscription will be allowed
to submit requests via Findmypast, and these will be free of charge. Findmypast
reserve the right to set a limit for any one subscriber - but I doubt that this
will affect normal users of their service.
How
to open a closed record if you are a subscriber
To open a closed record you need to start from the
transcription, not the image.
You might think that the first step is
to click Check if you can open a closed
record - and it might be, but only if you want more information about the
procedure before you start.
When you're ready to go ahead and ask
for the record to be opened you'll need to click Update the record and choose Ask
us to open a closed record from the drop-down menu.
This displays the form that you'll need
to complete - whilst it asks for an address there will be occasions when you
don't know the address (eg because the individual had
been evacuated). You have to type something in the boxes however, so when I
asked for my mother's record to be opened I wrote something along the lines of
"address not known, probably evacuated to Suffolk", which is the
story in the family.
I got an acknowledgement back a few
hours later, and so far I haven't been asked to provide additional information
- but I do know that some LostCousins members have.
I suspect that, as with any record set
of this size, there will be some records that have not been included in the
original release. Fortunately, because we can search by address, as well as by name, or birthdate it will usually be fairly obvious if a
street or part of a street is missing.
I hope that if and when extra records
are added Findmypast will give some indication of the content, and tell us
whether we can expect further releases.
Update: a lot of addresses don't show
up in the address search, even though other houses in the same street do appear
in the search results, and the missing households can be found if you search
by name! I shall post further updates as more information becomes available.
Already there have been some exciting
discoveries - but for once I'm not going to mention the name of the members
involved since some of the topics are a little sensitive.
For example, one member wrote in to tell
me that:
"I
finally confirmed that a hush-hush family rumour was true. My uncle 'lived in
sin' - as it was known, with a lady who was not his wife and who he never
married. They split up and he later married the lady who I always knew as my
aunt. I am sure you have received many such revealing stories already and I'm
sure there will be many more to come."
I'm sure that's true - there will be
many more interesting stories. Another member found out what happened to a
cousin who had been adopted - the 1939 Register not only showed their name
after adoption, but also their name after they married. I can't think of any
other way of finding out this information - it’s little
things like this that make the 1939 Register special.
In 1939 the country was divided into
more than 1400 administrative areas, each of which was assigned a three
letter code, such as
CJL for Bromley in Kent and ZDJ for Portmadoc
in Caernarvonshire. When you find one of your relatives you've find that a
fourth letter has been appended to the end - this specifies the enumeration
district.
You will find a table of all the codes
and areas here.
When you're reading my newsletters I
hope you click the links to see the other information that I've hunted down.
There are two key reasons why I use links, rather than include everything in
the body of the newsletter: one is copyright (especially when it comes to
photos and other images), the other is to avoid to repeating things that are
perfectly well-expressed elsewhere.
For example, in my 15th October
newsletter I linked to a copy of the form that householders completed on 29th
September 1939, so that you'd know precisely what information was collected. I
also linked to an image of the first page of the form, showing the instruction
to householders, so that you would have a better idea of how to interpret the
information you were going to see.
I know that there's a lot in each
newsletter, but if you don't follow up the links you'll miss out on an awful
lot - which is one reason why you should read the newsletter online, rather
than printing it out. In an era of tablets and electronic books surely we don't
need to have a hard copy? All my newsletters as far back as February 2009 are
still online, and still at the same web address as they were when first
issued - there really is no need to print them out. In fact, they're easier
to read on screen because you can change the text to any size you want (using
the Zoom function in your browser).
By all means skim through the newsletter
first time round - but please, please, please go back and read it properly
afterwards. It won't be just you who benefits - it will also save me getting
grumpy (there's nothing worse than having to point out for the umpteenth time
that the answer was in the newsletter all along).
Canada reinstates 'long
form' census
Following a change of government in
Canada the 'long form' census has been reinstated - you can see one of the many
articles about it here.
But before those of us concerned about
the future of the British census get too excited, it's worth considering that
it was primarily statisticians who were up in arms. In Britain the interests of
family historians and statisticians are very different - we want to know about
people, whereas they just want numbers.
Lord Lucan's death certificate to be issued - 41 years
late?
Jenny, one of the secretaries at the
company I was working for in 1974 had previously been employed by Lady Lucan.
It was probably just as well she changed jobs, because in November 1974 the
nanny who looked after the Lucan children was brutally murdered - and, as Lord
Lucan disappeared around the same time, it has long been thought by many that
he was the assailant. Most people believe that he took, or lost, his life
shortly afterwards, but no body has ever been found.
A quarter of a century later, in 1999,
Lord Lucan was formally declared dead in the High Court, allowing his will to
be proved, but it still wasn't possible to issue a death certificate - and so
his son George was unable to succeed to the peerage.
Last year the Presumption of Death Act
2013 came into force: this allows a Certificate of Presumed Death to be issued
- you can read the Act here, or find
out more at the Missing
People website.
Note:
Missing People is a charity which will search for missing people on behalf of
the friends and family left behind and provide specialised support to ease
their heartache and confusion.
Family burial vault
discovered by accident
On the day that the 1939 Register was
launched the BBC reported the accidental discovery of a family vault at
Gloucester Cathedral - it was found by archaeologists while surveying the site
ahead of the installation of a new lift.
You can read more about this discovery here; there's
also a link to an article about the discovery of a 1000 year-old cemetery at
the same cathedral earlier this year.
No actual tips this time - I just wanted
to thank the dozens of people from all over the world who have sent in tips following
the disclosure that my wife and I are finally going to get a new kitchen next
year (our existing kitchen is 32 years old).
I have, I hope, thanked you all
personally, but I wanted to take this opportunity to do so in public!
Tony on the LostCousins Forum spotted this very
informative blog post about the 1939 Register.
Please also see an important update to the article Are there records missing?
Finally, an apology to anyone who I might
have been a little sharp towards this week - I've had very little sleep as a
result of the release of the 1939 Register and all the extra work that this has
entailed, so on occasions I may have allowed my weariness to show through.
Thanks for putting up with me!
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2015 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, since standard membership, which includes this newsletter,
is FREE?