Newsletter
- 12 January 2013
Child
migration scandal on film
Ancestry
add passenger lists 1890-1960
Have
you claimed your free credits?
Last
chance to get a free upgrade
Do
you believe what's in the newspapers?
Birthday
Book - the final chapter
The LostCousins newsletter is
usually published fortnightly. To access the previous newsletter (dated 1
January 2013) please click here; for an index to articles
from 2009-10 click here.
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).For your convenience, when you click on a link a new
browser window or tab will open (so that you don’t lose your place in the
newsletter) - if nothing seems to happen then you need to enable pop-ups in
your browser.
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!
Child migration scandal on
film
Almost exactly three years ago I wrote in
this newsletter about child migration from Britain to Commonwealth nations such
as Canada and Australia - you can read the original article here
(I've updated the links).
Tonight (Saturday) at 9.45pm BBC2 will
be showing Oranges
and Sunshine, Jim Loach's 2010 film about a social worker who
discovered that thousands of British children had been forcibly deported to
Australia in the decades following the Second World War. Margaret Humphreys
went on to found the Child Migrants Trust which continues to link migrants with
their families.
The Radio
Times describes it as an "historical drama" - and yet it's about shocking
events that happened during the lifetime of most LostCousins members. I'm going
to take the liberty of repeating two paragraphs from the Child Migrants Trust
website (they're headlined "Rhetoric and Reality") to give you some
idea of what happened:
After being told
fanciful tales of travel to the "Land of Milk and Honey," where
children ride to school on horseback and pick up fruit on the side of the road,
child migrants were sent abroad without passports, social histories or even the
most basic documents such as a full birth certificate. Brothers and sisters
were frequently separated on the docks and sent to institutions in different
parts of the country; some were finger-printed and then loaded onto the backs
of trucks for long journeys to institutions in remote regions, only to be put
to work as labourers the next day. Many felt an extreme sense of rejection by
their family and country of origin or both. Others felt rather like characters
from one of Kafka's novels; their sentence was obvious - exile from their
family and homeland - but the nature of their crime was a complete mystery.
The tragic reality
for many child migrants was appalling standards of care which fell well below
accepted standards found within British institutions. Far too many children
experienced practices and policies which would not have been tolerated by
British child care agencies in that era. Children as young as seven, sent to
institutions in Western Australia, were involved in construction works without
adequate food or basic safety measures. Many were injured in building accidents
at an age when they would have been in school or playing with their friends if
they had remained in the United Kingdom.
The film is available on DVD through Amazon.co.uk
and Amazon.com.
If you follow those links you'll also find Margaret Humphreys' book, which is
available as a paperback or in Kindle format. I haven't seen the film yet (I'll
be tuning in this evening) - but if the Amazon reviewers' comments are anything
to go by it will be inspirational.
Ancestry add
passenger lists 1890-1960
For the past 5 years findmypast (and its
associated sites) have been the only online source of the Outgoing Ships'
Passenger Lists compiled by the Board of Trade between 1890 and 1960 - so I was
surprised to discover that Ancestry
added these records last week.
Unfortunately I still can't find an
entry for my great uncle, who is believed to have gone to Canada (where he died
in a logging accident), but it's always useful to have a second source for key
records such as these.
The oldest underground railway in the
world is in London. Affectionally known as "the
tube" the network of railways under the capital originally used steam
trains to haul passengers under the city streets - goodness knows what Health
& Safety inspectors would say about that these days (there were enough
health concerns at the time)!
The London Underground map, designed by
Harry Beck in 1931, and first introduced in 1933, is a design icon that has
been imitated many times. On Thursday, the 150th anniversary, Google changed its
logo to one that paid homage to the tube map.
If you follow this link you'll
find a collection of articles about the history of the tube. I also enjoyed Christian
Wolmar's book
which not only covers the historical and social aspects, but also the political
angles, and the competition between the different railways that criss-crossed
the capital.
As a young child I always listened to Listen With Mother
on the BBC Home Service, so I was sad to hear of the death of Daphne Oxenford, who must have said the magic words "Are you
sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin" many thousands times during her 20-odd
years in the role.
However, it wasn't until I read her obituary that
I realised what a long and varied career she had - she was nearly 90 when she
played her last role in 2008. I'd like to think that at her funeral they played
Berceuse,
the theme tune from Listen With Mother.
Tip:
I found a website that has clips from numerous old radio and TV programmes.
Perhaps the most important new release
of 2013 will be the British Library collection of Electoral Registers, which is
being digitised by findmypast
(you'll find the original announcement from 2011 here).
If, like me, you've found some of your ancestors in the London
Electoral Registers at Ancestry,
or in the Midlands
Electoral Registers at the same site, you'll know how useful it can be to
be able to trace their movements year by year (particularly during the early
20th century - in the 19th century far fewer people were entitled to vote).
However, for some researchers the
records of baptisms, marriages, and burials from the archives of the British
India Office, also now held by the British Library, will be an even more
important event - tracking ancestors who lived and worked overseas can be
incredibly difficult.
According to the original press release
from the British Library, these two projects involve the digitisation of 5 millions pages of records, and my guess is that there will
be hundreds of millions of names!
Have you claimed
your free credits?
It's your last chance to claim the 50
free credits, worth over £5, that findmypast are giving as a Christmas gift to
readers of this newsletter.
Tip:
you can circulate this offer to your friends and relatives, but to make sure
they get their credits they'll need to register as LostCousins members before
taking up the findmypast offer. Just email them this link: http://lostcousins.com/newsletters/jan13news.htm#FreeCredits
This isn't one of those so-called free
offers where you'll be asked to provide your credit card details - there are no
catches (although you will have to register with findmypast, of course). To
find out how to claim your free credits follow this link to my
Christmas newsletter. Of course, you can only claim once - findmypast may be
generous, but they're not stupid.
Even if you already have a findmypast subscription
you can use the credits to access records that aren't included in your
subscription - it's a great opportunity to check out the new World records, or
to find living relatives with a search of the current Electoral Register.
Note:
according to my calculations, if every reader of this newsletter claims their 50
credits that's over £300,000 worth of credits in all - not bad for a late
Christmas present!
Last chance to get a free
upgrade
Until the end of the January you can get
a free LostCousins subscription (worth up to £12.50) when you save 10% on ANY subscription
at findmypast.co.uk by clicking here and
entering the offer code LCXMAS in
the promotional code box at the left hand side of the Subscribe page.
Since you can save £16 on a 12 month
World subscription your TOTAL savings could be as much as £28.50!
Tip:
if you want to share this offer with other researchers, don't simply pass on
the code. Instead, please send them a link to this newsletter - that way they
might be inspired to link up with their own 'lost cousins'.
I recommend you read the following
instructions all the way through before
starting the process, because there are some important bits at the end.
(1) Click here to go the findmypast website (it will open in a new
tab or browser window), then either register or log-in (if you have registered
previously). If you aren't taken to the Subscribe page automatically, click Subscribe in the top right hand corner.
(2) Enter the exclusive offer code LCXMAS in the Promotional Code box, and
click Apply to display the discounted
offer prices.
(3) Choose the subscription that's best
for you, bearing in mind that 12 month subscriptions offer by far the best
value (because the second 6 months is almost half price).
The new World subscription includes Ireland, Australia
& New Zealand, and the USA (click
on the country name to see precisely which records are included).
If you're only interested in British
records then I'd strongly recommend the Full subscription rather than the
Foundation subscription, which only offers basic records and is therefore most
suitable for beginners. The wealth of additional datasets you get with a Full
subscription are well worth the small additional cost, especially when you
consider that a subscription to just one of them - the newspaper collection -
would cost £79.95 if purchased separately.
(4) If during the process you are logged
out for any reason, or if your credit card isn't accepted, you must start again
at step (1) to ensure that you qualify for your free LostCousins subscription.
(5) When you receive your email receipt
from findmypast forward a copy to me so that I can verify your entitlement (you
won't find my email address on the website, but it is in the email I sent
telling you about this newsletter). Your free LostCousins subscription will run
for 6 or 12 months and can include your spouse or partner as well - just make
sure that the two accounts are linked together before you write to me
(the Subscribe page at the
LostCousins site explains how to do this). If you already have a LostCousins
subscription I'll extend it.
If you have been forwarded this
newsletter by a friend or relative you'll need to register as a LostCousins
member before claiming your free subscription.
Note:
these offers cannot be combined with any other offers (other than the free
credits offer above) or discounts or backdated; if your findmypast subscription
is renewed automatically you won't qualify, but providing you follow the steps
above you may qualify for a free LostCousins subscription when you upgrade, eg from Foundation to Full, or from Full to World.
Do you believe what's
in the newspapers?
In my last newsletter I published an
article about Thomas Drisdell, a scalemaker
working in London, who despite living in poverty and dying in the workhouse in
1823, turned out - according to a contemporary newspaper account - to have been
very rich (you can read it again here).
It's amazing what LostCousins members
can achieve - within days of the article appearing I had an email from Shaun,
who was able to demonstrate using probate records and the burial register for
St James, Clerkenwell that Thomas Drisdell
was really Robert Tristram. Indeed, the correct name
had been published in other newspapers a few days earlier!
Note:
the main question I posed was "Who was Mary Ann Thompson?" (the beneficiary of Drisdell/Tristram's will). The next step is to get a copy of Tristram's will and see precisely what it says about her.
Birthday Book - the
final chapter
There has been an amazing response to
the challenge I set members over Christmas - to attempt to identify the
owner(s) of a Birthday Book which appears to date from the late 19th or early
20th century. I've been very impressed by the entries so far, but I'm not yet
convinced that anyone has found the right answer. Perhaps with the final
instalment the pieces will fall into place?
As the final instalment is rather large
- there are 17 more entries - I've created a separate web page for them, which
you'll find by clicking here (you may
find you have to refresh the page by pressing F5 in order to see all of the
images, possibly more than once).
Note:
it's not too late to enter the challenge - you can see the previous instalments
here
and here.
I've written
in the past about Genealogists for
Families, a group of researchers who have banded together to lend small
amounts of money through the Kiva website to poor people in the developing world
who are trying to improve their lot through hard work - and I'm delighted to
say that so far LostCousins members have made an amazing 336 loans!
For $25,
about £16, you can help change someone's life. And, because it's a loan, when
they repay it you can lend the money to somebody else! To become part of this
wonderful humanitarian project simply follow this link.
The UKBMD website has links to all of
the local BMD projects in England & Wales - it's an easy way to find out
whether local indexes of births, marriages, and deaths exist for the areas
where your ancestors lived.
Now that it's so easy to search the GRO
indexes, which cover the whole country, you might be wondering why local
indexes are relevant - and yet they can be an incredibly valuable resource.
For a start, some events don't appear in
the GRO indexes or are grossly misrepresented - and even if errors and omissions
are pointed out, the online indexes don't change. But the main reason I find local
GRO indexes useful is the inclusion of additional fields that aren't recorded
in the GRO indexes (or were only added in the 20th century, such as the
spouse's surname, or the mother's maiden name). Often the extra information in
the index can remove the need to buy a certificate - a big saving these days!
UKBMD is one of those sites I
don't write about very often - because, like FreeBMD or GENUKI, it's one of those sites that I
assume everyone already uses. Make sure that you find out about the local
indexes for the areas of interest to you!
Note:
The
Genealogist's Internet (now in its 5th edition) is a great guide to
websites that you might otherwise have missed.
I often get emails from members asking
why the online GRO indexes only go up to 2005 (or 2006 in the case of the births
and deaths at findmypast).
The simple fact is that the GRO are
covering their a***s. After many years of making these
indexes available online the GRO suddenly discovered that the relevant Acts didn’t
say anything about online indexes - hardly surprising because they were all
passed long before the World Wide Web came into existence (in 1836 the adhesive
postage stamp had yet to be invented).
It is possible to search later indexes,
but only on microfiche and only at six locations in England and one in Wales
(there's a list here).
There are so many people who are unable to visit in person - because they live
too far away or are housebound - that I'd be interested in hearing from anyone
who lives close to one of the complete indexes (within walking distance or bus
pass area) and would be prepared to undertake lookups on behalf of others.
Next year is the centenary of the
outbreak of World War 1. If you're trying to find information about one of your
relatives it's well worth visiting the Long Long Trail
website, which has an excellent guide to finding and interpreting Army records
from this period. For example, many of us have found medal index cards, but do
we know what all the notation means?
Nowadays most people don't bother buying
a camera because they can use their phone to take photographs - yet 200 years
ago neither phones nor cameras had been invented, and if you wanted a visual
reminder of someone you'd commission a portrait painter!
Three years ago I ran a series of
articles I this newsletter in an attempt to discover the oldest person who had
been photographed - and LostCousins members, resourceful as ever, came up with several
examples of people who were born in the 1750s (the articles can be found using
the index for 2009-2010 - see the link at the start of this newsletter).
In 1889 the German Field Marshall Helmuth von Molkte was recorded
congratulating Thomas Edison on the invention of the phonograph - you can hear
this recording on YouTube.
Von Moltke was born in 1800, and this is the only sound
recording to survive of someone who was born that long ago.
Note:
on a recent edition of QI, the quiz programme, it was claimed that von
Moltke was born in 1798, but they seem to have
confused him with the Danish Count, Karl von Moltke -
however I'm getting my information from the Internet, so I could also be wrong!
In December 2010, I filmed my 94
year-old father using one of the first 3D camcorders. I did briefly wonder
whether my late father, who was born in 1916, was the oldest person to have
been recorded in three-dimensions - but then I discovered on Wikipedia that the first 3D
footage was recorded in 1915, before my father was even born!
Are you recording members of your
family? With all these technological resources available to us it would be a
shame if we didn't make use of them!
According to exercise scientist Dr John
Buckley at the University of Chester, office workers can lose 8lb a year simply
by standing up for an extra three hours a day (I guess the same would apply to
family historians who sit in front of their computer or a microfiche reader for
hours on end). There's an article on the BBC News site here.
I can't vouch for the accuracy of Dr
Buckley's recommendations, but I do know that exercising is a great way to lose
weight - and you get fitter at the same time. I use a fitness program called EA
Sports Active 2 which works on the Nintendo Wii (though there are also
versions for the PS3 and Xbox 360). The program not only works out the exercise
routines, it also checks that I'm doing the exercises correctly.
Mind you, I've found that it's an awful
lot easier to take control of my weight by keeping an eye on what I eat - even
a tough 40 minute work-out only uses up 250-300 calories, and there are 3500
calories in a pound of fat. When you consider that there are 71 calories in a single
plain digestive biscuit and 124 in a slice of wholemeal bread (even before it's buttered), it is clearly easier not to eat so much in
the first place!
I know that I'm getting something right
when I get angry emails from members - if my newsletter wasn't thought-provoking
as well as informative I wouldn't be doing my job properly. In my last Tips
column I wrote how, by buying food from the reductions shelves at the
supermarket, I was able to serve up a four course gourmet meal on New Year's Eve
for less than the cost of a breakfast at Little Chef - and I was promptly
criticised for encouraging food wastage.
It is true that a lot of food is wasted,
but buying food that would otherwise be thrown away isn't part of the problem -
it's part of the solution! And, as I said to my
correspondent, people of my generation aren't ones to waste food. My mother would
tell me that I had to eat everything in my plate "because of all the
hungry children in China", and I wouldn't have dreamt of doing anything
else. But these days children with food fads are
indulged and pampered - it's no wonder that more food is being wasted than ever
before.
Another correspondent criticised my
frequent mentions of Amazon, on the grounds that their European headquarters are
in Luxembourg, which means that they only charge 3% VAT on electronic books,
rather than 20%. Reprehensible? Maybe, until you
remember that in the UK there's no VAT at all on printed books - so arguably
Amazon are simply levelling out the playing field.
And after all, which of us is going to
refuse to take out an Ancestry subscription simply because their European
headquarters are also in Luxembourg - which means that they charge 15% VAT on
subscriptions instead of 20%?
Of course, most of the emails I receive
are complimentary, and I couldn't help blushing when I read this note from
Rachel:
"I
just wanted to thank you, not only for the excellent newsletter, but all the
many tips that have saved me and my family this past year, including buying
stamps online before they went up (we still have many left) and the offer code
for my Find My Past sub. And all the Tesco tips, plus book recommendations. I
too could not live without Amazon and my Kindle (well, my iPad
too if I'm honest). I have just started the first book by Steve Robinson which
I'm enjoying (especially as it's based in my home county)."
Thank you, Rachel, and thank you to the
thousands of members who have written to express their appreciation over the past
12 months.
This where any late
updates will be posted, so it's worth checking back after a few days.
I hope you've found this newsletter
interesting and that you'll make full use of your membership of my site to link
with the cousins you don't yet know (your 'lost cousins').
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2013 Peter Calver
You
may link to this newsletter or email a link to your friends and relatives
without asking for permission in advance. I have included bookmarks so you can
link to a specific article: right-click on the relevant entry in the table of
contents at the beginning of the newsletter to copy the link.
Please
do not re-publish any part of this newsletter without permission, either on
your own website or in any other format. It is better for all concerned to
provide a link as suggested above, not least because articles are often
updated.