Newsletter
- 1st June 2013
The
future of the UK Census EXCLUSIVE
How would
you improve the National Archives website?
1895
Valuation Rolls live at Scotlandspeople
Good
news! Findmypast offer extended EXCLUSIVE
450,000
new parish records at findmypast
Early
colour movie shows London in 1927
Reprobate
relative reportedly rides round recklessly
Researching
your military ancestors GUEST AUTHOR
The LostCousins newsletter is
usually published fortnightly. To access the previous newsletter (dated 23 May
2013) click here, for an index to articles
from 2009-10 click here, for
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The future of the UK
Census EXCLUSIVE
Almost exactly three years ago family
historians were shocked to learn that the future of the Census was in doubt
(you'll find my news article here),
but as this issue hasn't been hitting the headlines recently you might have
assumed that the storm had blown over. However, a lot has been happening behind
the scenes...
In October 2011 I alerted readers of
this newsletter to the publication of a consultation document, and I was
heartened to see that whilst they were primarily seeking responses from users
of statistics, rather than from people like us who use the raw data, family
historians were the second-largest group of respondents (after local
authorities). You can download the consultation report here
(it is in PDF format).
Following the consultation a list of 6
options has been set out, only one of which would involve the continuation of
the census as we know it (but with greater use of the Internet). Other options
include a rolling census, where up to 10% of the population is surveyed each
year (a similar approach is currently used in France), and a short-form census
every 10 years with an annual survey of around 4% of the population (as in the
US). There's an explanation of each of the options on pages 14-17 of this report
(PDF format).
Although the consultation 18 months ago
wasn't intended for family historians, the report acknowledged that this had
been a mistake, and there was even a mention for this newsletter on page 63!
There is likely to be a further
consultation later this year - this time let's ensure that genealogists are the
largest group of respondents!
How would you improve the
National Archives website?
There have been lots of improvements to
the National Archives website, so it's very much to their credit that they are
open to the idea that it could be made even better.
On Thursday 13th June there will be a
workshop at Kew, and they are aiming to attract a representative sample of
website users. If you'd like to be considered, follow this link
to the TNA Forum, and if you're lucky enough to be invited do let me know how
it goes (unfortunately I have a prior engagement)..
1895 Valuation
Rolls live at Scotlandspeople
Scotlandspeople have just
launched these new records, comprising 2,095,707 indexed names and 75,565
digital images, which cover every kind of building, structure or dwelling that
was assessed in 1895 as having a rateable value, and provide
a fascinating picture of Scottish society during the late Victorian era. You
can learn more about the records here.
Good news! Findmypast
offer extended EXCLUSIVE
I've managed to persuade findmypast to
extend the exclusive discount offer for readers of this newsletter that was due
to expire on Friday 31st May - not by a day, or even a week, but by a whole
month!
In view of findmypast's generosity I'm
going to match them by extending my own offer of a free LostCousins
subscription. I won't repeat all the details - you can find them here - but
please make sure that you read them through first, then follow them exactly.
450,000 new parish
records at findmypast
Findmypast
have added 450,000 new parish records, mainly Suffolk and Wiltshire baptisms
(you'll find full details here).
As I've got several 'brick walls' in
Suffolk those were the records I looked at most closely - and thanks to the new
records I've just brought one, possibly two, of my 'brick walls' tumbling down
after 10 years. I can only hope you're as fortunate!
I've written recently about the Rector
of Runwell in Essex who patented an electrical system
for ringing the bells in his church, and this prompted an email from Philippa in France who tells me that in her local church
they have an electrical system with a control box that is a labelled with all
the different bell changes.
My first thought was that in this
digital age they might simply blast out a recorded bell using loudspeakers, but
after further investigation Philippa was able to
confirm that the bells actually swing under the control of the system.
Yet another British invention that has
been exploited by foreigners!
Prior to 1912 the GRO marriage indexes
for England & Wales don't show the spouse's surname - and until the FreeBMD
project began to transcribe the GRO indexes it was virtually impossible to find
out who someone married without ordering the certificate.
Even now it's not always
straightforward. FreeBMD, Ancestry, and findmypast will all show you possible
spouses - people whose marriages are recorded on the same page of the register
- but usually there will be four people in all, two male and two female, which
typically gives you a choice of two spouses (with luck you'll be able to work
out which your relative married from census records).
However, sometimes there will be 3 names
- or 5. When there's an extra name this indicates that the index references for
one of them has been mistranscribed, so it's simply a
matter of looking up the index pages for each and correcting the one that's
wrong. But what if there are only 3 - where do you start looking?
Some of the transcription errors from
1865 onwards aren't really errors by the transcribe,
but a result of misprints in the indexes - typically one of the digits in the
page number is only partially printed. Almost any of the digits, but especially
the rounded ones such as 0, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, can be mistaken for one of the
others if a little bit of ink is missing.
At FreeBMD you can search for entries on
a specific page in a specific quarter, but you can also search by registration
district. If you search for marriages (say) in the relevant registration
district you'll get a relatively short list - I selected at random St George in
the East, March 1900 quarter, which has 88 marriages.
The next step is to copy the data into a
spreadsheet so that you can sort it by page number
(use Paste Special and choose
'Text'). Here are the last 18 entries:
Dunn |
Alice |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
394 |
Girling |
Florence Mary |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
394 |
Murphy |
Patrick Michael |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
394 |
WEST |
William |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
394 |
Driscoll |
Mary |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
395 |
Guinness |
William Patrick |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
395 |
McCarthy |
Mary |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
395 |
O'Callaghan |
William |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
395 |
BAILEY |
Ann |
St Geo.East |
1c |
396 |
Donovan |
Hannah |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
396 |
Purcell |
Michael |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
396 |
Tracey |
Michael |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
396 |
Black |
Joseph |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
397 |
Leary |
Johanna |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
397 |
McDonough |
Margaret |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
397 |
Sullivan |
Edward |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
397 |
Dodgson |
Arthur |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
587 |
Mill |
John |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
636 |
The two at the end have obviously been mistranscribed, because they're on their own. When I looked
up Arthur Dodgson's marriage in the indexes I discovered that the page number
was correct but he'd actually married in the district of St George Hanover
Square (on the other side of London); the John Mill entry had two errors - it
should be volume 1b and St Giles registration district.
(Note that even though the volunteers
who compile the FreeBMD transcriptions are family historians themselves, they
still make mistakes.)
Let's take a look at some of the other
entries:
Byrman |
Ferdinand |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
385 |
Fischer |
John William L |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
385 |
Oelers |
Emilie Josephine J |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
385 |
Oelers |
Emily Juliane
J |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
385 |
Von Der Horst |
Maria A A |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
385 |
Ambur |
Betsy |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
386 |
Amdur |
Betsy |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
386 |
Baldock |
Louisa |
St.Geo.
East |
1c |
386 |
Cawstan |
John |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
386 |
WASSERMAN |
David Aaron |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
386 |
Bocater |
Elizabeth |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
387 |
Bomze |
Bertha |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
387 |
Grãser |
Johann |
St. Geo.East |
1c |
387 |
Tobaben |
Meta |
St Geo.East |
1c |
387 |
Trief |
Davis |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
387 |
Fuchs |
Katharina |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
388 |
Putterfuss |
Minnie |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
388 |
Rosenberg |
Abram Solomon |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
388 |
Singer |
Katharina |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
388 |
Timm |
Edward Georg F |
St. Geo. East |
1c |
388 |
You'll see that there are 5 entries for each
of pages 385, 386, 387, and 388. In the case of pages 385 and 386 this is
clearly because one entry has been transcribed twice with slightly different names,
but it's not so obvious why pages 387 and 388 have an extra entry.
I suspect that Katharina Fuchs and
Katharina Singer were one and the same - in other
words, she had an alias which was shown in the register (the unusual forename is
a clue, and all of the entries appear to have been transcribed correctly). But
the page 387 entry for Elizabeth Bocater was a
transcription error - the correct page number is 381.
In this particular case the entry for
Elizabeth Bocater had been transcribed twice by
different transcribers, so was also shown at FreeBMD
with the correct page number - but she might not have been, and this spreadsheet analysis might have been the only way to find
the entry.
I say "might have been"
because, of course, there's more than one site that has transcribed the GRO
registers. Ancestry use the FreeBMD data up to 1915, so there would be little
point checking there, but findmypast
have transcribed the data independently.
So far Ancestry haven't
fixed the 1.2 million errors in the GRO birth and death indexes which I
highlighted in my last
newsletter (remember that these systematic errors are in addition to any
transcription errors).
I've also had reports coming in from
members of other errors, some of which I knew about and some of which I didn't.
Patricia pointed out that there are a lot of parish register entries,
particularly baptisms, where the surname is given as 'Sarah' - and, as you’d
expect, in nearly every case this was actually a forename. Thanks also to
Patricia for reminding me of one of my oldest tips - to try swapping the names
around and searching for "Smith John" instead of "John
Smith".
Robert also complained about Ancestry's
'hints', which some users of their site seem to accept as 'facts' by including
them in their tree - I suspect they're mostly beginners who assume that
Ancestry's algorithm is cleverer than it really is.
Several members have commented that
Ancestry's new map feature for the 1911 Census comes up with the wrong maps far
too often - sometimes it isn't even the right county! I remember that Genes
Reunited had a similar system at one time (perhaps they still do) but it was also
not very precise. There's even talk that findmypast are considering integrating
maps into their site, but hopefully they won't waste their time unless they can
produce better results than have been achieved so far!
Early colour movie shows
London in 1927
Marilyn in Australia told me about some
rare colour footage which shows what London looked like almost a century ago -
you can view it here.
Claude Friese-Greene,
who shot the film using the Biocolour process
invented by his late father William, also made a 1924 colour film of the 1000
mile road trip from Land's End to John O'Groats. The
Open Road has been restored by the British Film Institute and is now
available on DVD.
Reprobate relative
reportedly rides round recklessly
Mel told me about an incident in 1897
when his great grandfather was arrested for reckless riding of a motorised
tricycle, and I found the newspaper article so amusing that I decided to share
it with you!
Note: the clipping is reproduced with the
kind permission of the British Newspaper Archive; the image was created
courtesy of the British Library Board. You can get 15 free credits when you
register for the first time at the British Newspaper Archive.
In 1897 the very concept of a motorised
vehicle must have been quite alien - there were few cars on the streets of
London, but I did come across this
entry on the Science Museum blog about the first electric taxi, which
appeared on London's streets in the same year and apparently had a top speed of
between 9-12 mph (faster than the average speed of London traffic in the 21st
century). Note that prior to November 1896 it was compulsory for a man with a
red flag to walk in from of any vehicle that was other than horse-drawn!
Tip:
over 6 million newspaper pages from the British Newspaper Archives can be
searched and viewed at findmypast if you have a Full or World subscription.
Most developed nations have been going
through a period of austerity since the recession began 5 years ago, and we're
all looking forward to GDP growth rates of 2% or even 3% resuming in due course.
However, it's sobering to reflect that for our ancestors low growth was a fact
of life.
It has been estimated (The Economist, 12th January 2013, p22) that
in Britain annual growth in GDP per person averaged only 0.2% until 1700 (so
that over the course of an entire generation the total growth would have been
just 7%, on average), and even when the Industrial Revolution began it was
little more than 0.3%. During the second half of the 19th century it was still
below 1%.
Of course, the economy of the country
grew faster than this, but that's because the population was growing - between
1841 and 1881 the number of people recorded on the England & Wales census rose from just under 16 million to nearly 26
million.
The 20th century was very different - per
capita GDP in Britain has virtually doubled over the past generation - so we've
become accustomed not just to a higher standard of living, but also a higher
rate of growth. What has taken a single generation for us would have taken 10
generations for our ancestors! Back in July 1957 Harold Macmillan, the Prime
Minister, uttered the famous (and often misquoted words) "most of our
people have never had it so good", yet GDP per head has risen more than 3
times since then.
I've no idea whether we can expect slow
growth in the future, or whether we'll go back to the
historically high rates of the late 20th century - but I do know that we're a darn
sight better off than our ancestors were in the "good old days"!
Perhaps if our expectations were as moderate as those of our ancestors we'd all
be a lot happier?
Researching your
military ancestors
Simon Fowler worked for the Public
Record Office, now the National Archives, for almost 30 years. He was also
editor of Family History Monthly and
later of Ancestors, the family
history magazine formerly published by the National Archives. I was therefore delighted
to be able to persuade Simon to write a short article exclusively for
LostCousins members:
Fowler’s
laws of military genealogy
1. The
closer your ancestor was to the fighting the more there is likely to be about
him. If he was in the front line there should be operational as well as
personnel records which provide more background
2. There
is likely to be more for officers than for other ranks. The only exception to this rule is service
records - officers’ records are disappointing - but this gap can largely be
made up by tracing officers through published Army/Navy lists and the London
Gazettes.
3. The
more recent your ancestor’s military experience the better the chance of
finding something. Although you may have a man’s service record it can be
surprising frustrating to work out exactly where he fought and what he
experienced during his time in the Army. During the Napoleonic wars, for
example, where records survive they usually relate to officers.
4. Military
records can be divided into three types: personnel (such as service and pension
records, court martial registers etc); operational
(war diaries and planning) and logistical (supplying provisions and equipment
to the forces). As family historians we largely interested in personnel and
operational records.
5. Records
of individuals largely relate to how much they were paid and how much pension
they were entitled to. However, promotions and demotions, disciplinary offences
and the award of good conduct and long service medals affected pay and pension
and should be recorded in the appropriate place. And in theory every day of a man’s service
should be recorded in some way. But in the heat of battle it was often
difficult for the clerks at the base depot to work exactly where a man was
serving and for whom. And this uncertainty can affect our understanding of
these records. This seems particularly true for the Burma campaign of 1942-45,
where service records seem to bear little resemblance to a man’s actual
service.
6. If
you want fully to understand an ancestor’s experiences of war it is best to
start by reading campaign and regimental histories before using the operational
records which can be difficult to interpret and even misleading. As with all
research it is best to start with the general before moving onto the specific.
6. The
records are only as good as the clerks and adjutants who completed them. So names are misspelt, initials are used
rather than full names (my great uncle Stanley Crozier’s medal index card, for
example, is indexed as HPS Crozier) and so.
War diaries may just record official visitors (particular the case in
WW2) rather provide a proper account of the unit’s activities. Even the award
of a Victoria Cross in a man in the unit may not be recorded.
8. There
are many more records than are available online. Most of these, like muster rolls, will never
be digitised. So to get a full picture
of your ancestor’s military service you should plan to visit The National
Archives or the appropriate service and regimental museums.
9. The
services were (and are) very bureaucratic.
This means if one set of records no longer survives there may be other
records which may contain much the same information. This is particularly true
for the eighteenth and nineteenth century army. So if a man’s service documents
no longer survive, you may be able to build up a picture from the muster rolls
(c1760-1898) and description books (c1780-1870) or, for the First World War,
medal index cards.
10. Although
regimental and the national military museums do not have personnel records they
may have other records which can help you build a picture of your ancestor’s
service, such as personnel papers, diaries and photographs. Remember, however, that most regimental
museums are understaffed or rely on volunteers, so be prepared for a long wait
for a reply and they may expect you to make a donation to the museum’s funds.
10. There
are always exceptions! There may be
nothing about a war hero, but by chance a mass of stuff may survive for an
ordinary soldier or sailor. You never
know what you are going to find. Happy
hunting!
Simon
Fowler is a professional researcher and writer with decades of experience in
researching soldiers, sailors and airmen. Find out more at http://www.history-man.co.uk
Note: Simon has recently published an
excellent ebook entitled Ancestors
In Arms: Tracing Your Family Military History which is available in
Kindle format from Amazon
(and having read it myself, I reckon he should be charging more for it!).
Remember, you don't need to own a Kindle to read books in Kindle format - you
can read them on your PC, tablet, or most smartphones.
Scientists have discovered the reason
why we remember so little from our early years - it seems that our brains
aren't geared up to establish long-term memories until we're 4 years old.
You'll find more on this topic in this BBC news article.
I mentioned earlier in this newsletter
that, thanks to findmypast's new Suffolk baptism records, I'd managed to knock
down at least one of my 'brick walls'.
But what we think of as a 'brick wall'
often isn't anything of the sort. Indeed, in the case of the 'brick wall' that
I've just knocked down, the clue could easily have been found if I'd spent a
few hundred hours scouring the parish registers at the Suffolk Record Office.
Of course, I'm using the word 'easily' ironically - because few of us have the
time and the determination to do something like that (which is why it's so
important that more and more parish registers are transcribed and made
available online).
An email I received this week from a
member faced with a 'brick wall' included the words "it may be that, after
13 years, I've more or less flogged each obvious possibility to death!". We all feel like that at times, but it's at those
moments that we need to remember that if the answer was obvious, it wouldn't be
a 'brick wall' - often when we can't knock down a 'brick wall' it's because
we're looking in the obvious places, rather than carrying out a systematic
search.
What if the father's name on the
marriage certificate was wrong? What if an incorrect birthplace is shown on
every census? What if they didn't marry at all? It's
questions like these that we need to ask ourselves, so that we're continually
challenging the evidence as if we were cross-examining our ancestors in a court
of law!
I recently presented a challenge
involving three doors which created a lot of controversy because the intuitively
obvious solution isn't the right one
(in fact, I'm still getting emails from readers who can't believe the answer I
published). Yet in our research we're frequently called upon to make judgement
calls - so how can we know when to trust our intuition and when that would be a
mistake? There is no simple answer - but I do know that the more we exercise
our skills and judgement, the better we get.
So I'm going to share with you a
challenge that was presented in the latest issue of Significance magazine, a publication of the Royal Statistical
Society (many thanks to Julian Champkin, the editor,
for allowing me to reproduce it here).
Phoney data
A policeman
in France stops and questions the occupants of a British-registered car. One of
them gives his name, his home town - Nottingham - and a mobile phone number. He
is allowed to proceed. It subsequently transpires that the mobile phone number
is made up.
Some months
later, an unknown individual in Nottingham goes into a bank and tries to
arrange a transfer of money. He gives a false name and a mobile phone number.
The number is the same as the one given in France.
The police
suspect that the two individuals are the same person. How likely is this on the
evidence given?
The question
the police actually asked was: "What are the odds of two separate
individuals in Nottingham making up the same mobile phone number?" Is this
the question they should be asking? Does it give the same answer as the other
question? Is Nottingham relevant to the answer? (The population of Nottingham
is 300,000, that of Britain is 60 million.) Can one
answer the first question at all? All mobile phone numbers in Britain are
11-digit numbers, and all begin with 07. The third digit can be 4, 5, 7, 8 or
9. The number given by the car occupant obeyed these rules.
This is based
on a request made recently to the RSS. Some details have been changed. Readers
are invited to send their responses and explanations - in less than 400 words -
to significance@rss.org.uk
This puzzle reminded me of something
that I came across recently when helping a member with their research. There
was a man who married twice under different names (the second marriage was
bigamous), yet on each occasion he gave the same information in respect of his
father (ie the same forename, and the same
occupation).
Even at the best of times we have to
look sceptically at the information on marriage certificates, because there are
often errors, some of which are clearly deliberate - and in this case we know
that the man was a liar who broke the law. But given that he gave the same
information on both occasions, is it likely that he was telling the truth about
his father, even though he wasn't telling the truth about himself?
I think I've identified the key
questions in the 'Phoney challenge' - but what about you? I wonder whether any
readers of this newsletter will be brave enough to compete with the
professionals of the RSS?
The very first hard drive I ever used
looked like a futuristic spin dryer. There were two of them in the computer
room of the company where I was working 35 years ago, and it was my
responsibility to make backups. This involved attaching a handle and very
carefully removing the platters from one drive so that I could copy the data
from the other drive across to a spare set.
I can't remember what the capacity of
those drives was, but I do remember that the very first hard drive I owned 30
years ago had a capacity of just 5 Megabytes. Mind you, there were bigger
capacities available - in 1980 IBM produced a hard drive with a capacity of 2.5
Gigabytes, though it cost $40,000, weighed a quarter of a ton, and was the size
of a refrigerator.
These days even laptop computers have
hard drives with 500 Gigabytes capacity, and my current desktop has a 1 Terabyte
drive, which means it can hold 200,000 times as much data as my first hard
drive (even though it cost a lot less). And if you compare it with my first
floppy disk drive (capacity a mere 100k), it's 10 million times as much!
Anyway, I was musing on this when I
encountered one of the largest hard disk drives I've ever seen - a massive 3
Terabyte. A quick calculation suggests that there's enough room to make a copy
of every hard drive on every computer I've ever owned and still have room for
the hundreds of DVD backup disks I've made over the years. It's an external
drive with its own power supply, so you don't need any technical knowledge - just
plug it into a USB port. However, the most amazing thing is the price - just £90
including delivery! Click here
to find out more. I should stress that I haven't bought one, but two-thirds of
the hundreds of reviewers on Amazon have awarded 5 stars, and two-thirds of the
remainder have given 4 stars, so I thought it was worth mentioning.
The first computer I ever owned was a
Commodore PET with a massive 8k of memory - it cost me nearly £700 in 1978,
which was an enormous sum in those days.
How times have changed - the 32Gb memory card
in my phone has 4 million times as much memory, yet cost less than £20 and is
the size of the nail on my little finger. I wouldn't be surprised if there are
readers of this newsletter who once owned a Commodore PET - some of you may
even have bought programs from Supersoft, the company
I founded (not to be confused with a similarly-named firm in Chicago).
Enough nostalgia! Next issue I promise
to have some more of my usual tips.
This where any late
updates will be posted, so it's worth checking back after a few days.
Hopefully it won't be long now before
the LostCousins forum opens to everyone - in the meantime if you've received an
invitation from me I'd encourage you to register at the forum right away!
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2013 Peter Calver
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