Newsletter - January 18, 2010
CONTENTS
Did your ancestors elope?
Suffer the little children
Child migration pt2
Wartime rationing in the UK
Finding records in London
More opportunities for volunteers
Hear me online at Genealogy Gems
Who Do
You Think You Are?
BMD records for 2007-08
Changes at the National Archives
How to add this newsletter to your
'favourites'
Peter's
Tips
Have
you tried….?
Stop Press
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Reproduced courtesy of Francis Frith.
Did your
ancestors elope?
The Marriage Act of 1753 outlawed irregular marriages in England &
Wales, such as those carried out at the Fleet Prison in London, and led to the
practice of couples travelling to Scotland - where the requirements were less
stringent - to marry. In the late 18th century Gretna Green acquired a
reputation as the place to go, a reputation that continued well into the 20th
century.
Marriage records for more than 20,000 people
who married at Gretna Green between 1794-1895 are now
available at Ancestry.
Suffer the little children
Janet wrote to me recently to ask about the Infant Life Protection Act
1897 - and I had to admit that I knew nothing about it. But once I started
looking into it, I was horrified by what I found - it makes Charles Dickens
seem like Walt Disney. In the 19th century there were few employment
opportunities for single women with children, and faced with the likelihood
that both they and their baby would die from starvation, many sought to place their children with people who were in a better
position to feed and clothe them. Adoption was not legally regulated in Britain
until 1927, and taking advantage of the situation a number of unscrupulous
women set up as 'baby farmers', taking in children in return for a monthly fee,
or a lump sum.
Classified advertisements were often used to attract mothers in distress, the text of the advertisement always promising a lot - the reality being that the children would be maltreated, and sometimes killed. In 1870 the horrifying case of Margaret Waters, who was charged with 5 counts of wilfully murdering children in Brixton led to an outcry, and a call for new laws. On October 12th The Times reported her execution the previous day, and reminded readers that "the wretched woman and her sister were proved to have systematically published advertisements offering to 'adopt' children for a remuneration that nobody in his senses could believe to be adequate."
The report continued "a sergeant of police unexpectedly gained entrance to the 'Baby Farm' and disclosed a scene of cruelty which… must make us shudder at the capacities for cruelty contained in human nature… some half-dozen little infants lay together on a sofa, filthy, starving, and stupefied by laundanum. They were suffering a death from slow poison." (Laudanum was a solution of opium and morphine.)
In 1871 the Select Committee on the Protection of Infant Life made recommendations that were incorporated in the Infant Life Protection Act of 1872, but sadly this proved insufficient to deter the baby farmers, and a further 7 women were to be hanged up to 1907. More legislation was passed, including the Infant Life Protection Act of 1897, and the Children's Act of 1908. The London Society of the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was founded in 1884 by the Reverend Benjamin Waugh - it changed its name to the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) in 1889. It's interesting to note that the Royal Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) had been founded fully 60 years earlier in 1824.
The paper Bastardy and Baby Farming in Victorian England offers further insight into the problem.
Child migration pt2
Child migration is such an emotive subject, I wasn't surprised at the number of emails I
received after my last article. It's therefore timely that in their January
sale the National Archives have reduced the price of New Lives for Old - the story of Britain's
child migrants from £18.99 to just £4.99
(less than half the price you'd pay at Amazon).
Joy wrote to tell me that her husband and two sisters had been sent to Rhodesia in 1952 under the Kingsley Fairbridge scheme - from what I can gather it was not a pleasant experience for any of them. A number of members wrote to me about the British Isles Family History Society of Greater Ottawa, and the extensive information about Home Children on their site; Library and Archives Canada is another free source of information.
Wartime rationing in the UK
From 1940 to 1954 food and certain other items, such as clothing and petrol,
were subject to rationing - I can remember that my mother used to qualify for
an extra egg when I was a toddler in the early 1950s. On Friday afternoon am
interesting program called Ration Book Britain aired on
the Yesterday Channel (formerly UKTV History),which is available on Freeview or Sky - don't worry if you missed it, as I'm sure
it will be re-shown before long. Given the shortage of meat and imported goods
many recipes were devised to make the most of home-grown vegetables, such as
the infamous "Woolton Pie", named after the
Minister of Food, Lord Woolton. If you're feeling
nostalgic there's a copy of the recipe here - by
all means add turnip if it's a particularly special occasion.
Finding records in London
Searching for baptism, marriage, and burial
records in London has been a lot easier since Ancestry launched their London Metropolitan
Archives collection - but did you realise
that there's a big hole in the middle?
Hundreds of registers for the old City of Westminster, which includes the civil parishes of St Anne Soho, St Clement Danes, St George Hanover Square, St James Piccadilly, St Margaret and St John Westminster, St Martin-in-the-Fields, St Mary-le-Strand, and St Paul Covent Garden are held not at the London Metropolitan Archives, but at the Westminster City Archives - and so aren't included in the LMA collection at Ancestry.
My
spies tell me that there's a chance that these registers may start appearing
online in 2011. In the meantime there's a list of the Westminster City Archives
holdings here (and
some of the records are indexed in the IGI).
Even if the records you're seeking are held at the London Metropolitan Archives, it can be difficult to find them - because of the way that records are filed under the names of the modern boroughs. Fortunately there's an invaluable index on the London Generations website which relates places and parishes to the relevant borough. You'll find this invaluable if you're searching at Ancestry - and another handy guide to London is the facsimile of the 1938 London A-Z, which shows the city and its environs before they were ravaged by 6 years of war.
Two final tips: when searching for records in London, don't forget that the parts of London south of the River Thames were not in Middlesex, but Surrey or Kent; also, findmypast have just added more London and Middlesex parish and probate records - click here for more details.
More
opportunities for volunteers
In the last issue I wrote about some of the ways in which volunteers are
making records more accessible, but I didn't mention FreeREG, a
great project that needs volunteer transcribers and co-ordinators, and members
with experience of other transcription projects would be especially welcome.
Already there are over 10 million records online, and the coverage of Norfolk is excellent - but most other counties have relatively sparse coverage, so I'm hoping that LostCousins members will step forward to help. In particular, now that most of the Essex registers are online, it's a great opportunity for researchers with roots in that county to get involved (and personally I'd also like to see more volunteers helping with neighbouring Suffolk, where I have several 'brick walls').
Hear me online at Genealogy Gems
I recently had the honour of being interviewed over the phone by Lisa
Louise Cooke who runs Genealogy Gems, and if you'd like to hear the interview
just go to the Genealogy Gems site, and click on the Family History
icon (just to the right of the screen that shows the Welcome video).
Who Do You
Think You Are?
It's 5 years since the series first aired in the
UK, and at last the US version series will get under way on March 5th, according
to an announcement from
NBC.
Here in the UK we're gearing up for Who Do You Think You Are? LIVE
2010 which takes place at Olympia from February
26th-28th. To get discounted tickets for the show click here.
BMD records for 2007-08
At Ancestry the BMD indexes for England & Wales only go up to
2005; at findmypast they go up to 2006. However I recently learnt from
LostCousins member Pete that the London Metropolitan Archives has microfiche
copies of the indexes that go right up to 2008 - and on January 25th-26th
representatives from the GRO will be at the LMA talking about their work. See
the events pages at the LMA website for more
details.
Changes at the National Archives
Just days after the National Archives at Kew implemented budget cuts - which
include closing on Mondays - the Chief Executive Natalie Ceeney
announced that she was heading off to pastures new (in the financial sector).
Hopefully her replacement will be able to avoid any further cuts in services by
eliminating unnecessary expenditure. For example, I recently ordered £25 worth
of books in their January sale - and because the order was over £15 there was
no additional charge for shipping within the UK. Imagine my surprise to
discover when the books arrived that they had been sent by First Class post, in
two separate packages, at a cost (in postage alone) of nearly £12. I can't
imagine any commercial organisation being as profligate with their money, and
although the sum involved is small, I wonder whether it's a symptom of the way
that OUR money is being spent at the National Archives?
How to add this newsletter to your 'favourites'
You may have noticed that the web address (or
URL) for this newsletter is the same as for the previous edition (and the one
before) - indeed, from now on the latest newsletter will always be on the same
web page. That's because I don't want you to have to wait for my email to
arrive to read the newsletter - you can check the page at any time to see
whether there's a new edition, or an update to the existing edition (in which
case it will be under Stop Press).
Why not add the newsletter page to your
'favourites'? To do this using Internet Explorer click on Favourites, then Add to
favourites (if you have the latest version of IE you can simply click 
to add a link to your toolbar). To create a
new bookmark in Firefox click 
Peter's Tips
If you live in the UK and are aged between 50
and 54, you have little more than two months to start taking money from your
occupational pension before the lower age limit goes up to 55 on April 6th. Not
thinking of retiring just yet? The fact is that drawing your pension can begin
long before you retire - and indeed, it's the people who are continuing to work
who have the most to gain, because of an ingenious trick known as income recycling (which will work even
if you're over 55, just so long as you're still working).
Any financial advisor should be able to tell you how income recycling works, but they would probably charge you for the privilege - whereas I'll tell you the principle for nothing! Very simply you take money out from your pension, then pay it back in again. I'm not talking about the lump sum that you can take tax-free, but the income that you can currently start drawing from the age of 50. Suppose that you are able to take £8000 a year as income - in this case you'd take £8000 out, then put it back in again. Sounds pointless, doesn't it?
Actually, it's far from pointless, because you've increased the part of your pension that can be taken as a cash free lump sum by £2000. So if you're a basic rate taxpayer like me you'll be £400 better off. Not so pointless, now, is it - particularly since you can continue doing this year after year until you stop working, or until you get to (I think) 75. I don't want to spend too much time here discussing this, but for anyone who is interested there's an example of how this might work on the Scottish Widows site. Of course, I'm not a financial adviser - I am simply drawing your attention to something that I didn't discover until yesterday, but certainly which I wish I'd known when I was younger.
Do you know any families with children that can't afford a computer and Internet connection? The Government is planning to provide 270,000 low income families with laptop computers and broadband connections under the Home Access initiative. Over 20,000 applications were made in the first few days, so if you know anyone who might qualify, encourage them to apply right away.
Finally, if you're a LostCousins subscriber, visit the Subscribers Only page to find out how you can save 5% on all subscriptions at one of the leading census sites.
Have you tried….?
Have you ever attempted to track down family movies shot on cine cameras
(that's the film equivalent of a camcorder, for anyone too young to know what
I'm talking about)?
My parents couldn't afford a cine camera, but a couple of family friends did own them - and a few years ago my sister mentioned that one of them had been filming at her wedding in the late 1970s, and wondered whether I might be able to locate the footage. To cut a long story short, I did manage to track down the film, which by that point had been transferred to VHS tape - and I copied it across to DVD so that everyone could have a copy.
But the story doesn't end there, because while copying that tape across I discovered a lot of scenes that had been shot in the 1960s around the church that my family used to attend: weddings, reunions, church parades, even the occasion when the congregation starred in 'Songs of Praise' on the BBC (this was long before home video recorders, and had been captured by pointing the camera at the TV screen).
Then last week I had an email from a LostCousins member who thought my name sounded familiar, and wondered whether I knew her husband. Indeed I did, though we hadn't met for 50 years! We were soon catching up over email - what a wonderful invention - and I sent him a DVD with the film taken at the church we both attended. It transpired that this not only had footage of his parents, but also offered glimpses of two of his grandparents (and from what I can gather it may be the only video footage of them in existence).
Was there someone with a cine camera in your childhood? Perhaps my story will inspire you to discover film footage that you'd forgotten about, or thought had been lost for ever.
Stop Press
This is where updates or amendments will
appear.
That's all for now - I hope you've found some of it relevant to you and your family tree. Please do keep sending in your comments and suggestions for future issues.
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
Copyright 2010 by Peter Calver & Lost Cousins Ltd except as otherwise stated