Newsletter
- 30th July 2014
12
months for under £50 - the amazing Findmypast offer ENDS THURSDAY
Finding
your way around the new site
WW1
remembrance database goes live
How one
man's vision led to the creation of WWI's War Graves
Lives of
the First World War: update
Did
your WW1 hero wear a helmet?
Last
chance to save 20% on photo restoration ENDS
TUESDAY
British
Newspaper Archive adds 1 million pages
Did
your ancestor work for Guinness?
Ancestry.com
offer free DNA tests to new US subscribers
The LostCousins newsletter is
usually published fortnightly. To access the previous newsletter (dated 23rd
July) click here, for an index to articles
from 2009-10 click here, for
a list of articles from 2011 click here and for a
list of articles from 2012-13 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 or change the settings in your security software.
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!
12 months for under £50
- the amazing Findmypast offer NOW ENDED
There are only 2 days left - Wednesday
and Thursday - to take advantage of the best findmypast.co.uk offer I've ever
seen.
For just £49.75 you can get a 12 month Britain
subscription which gives unlimited access to all of findmypast's British
records - that's HALF PRICE!
Click here to take advantage of this great
opportunity (and by using that link you'll be supporting LostCousins at the
same time).
The offer officially closed on Thursday
31st July - but it didn't end until the following Monday, so a I hope a few more
readers took advantage of this bargain!
Note:
Britain includes England, Scotland, and Wales - but not Ireland. Findmypast has
a separate Irish website and if you're quick you can take advantage of their 1
month for 1€ offer, which also officially ended on Thursday but was still available
on Sunday (click here
for details).
Finding your way around
the new site
One of the best things about findmypast's
new site is that there are many different ways to search - at one extreme you
can search every record simultaneously, at the other you can search a single record
set.
What's the best strategy? It depends how
much you know about your ancestors, and how well you know your way around the
records. Most of the time I search individual record sets, because this gives
me the great control over the search - allowing me to maximise the chance of
finding the records I want, whilst excluding the records that aren't relevant.
When you search an individual record set
the search form is tailored to the information that you're likely to find in
the records - in other words, the fields on the search form are a pretty good match
for those in the records. That's what gives you the greatest control over the
search.
However, when you search more widely,
especially if you're searching different types of record, the search form can't
possibly be a good match for all of them - it will necessarily be a compromise.
My advice is to search individual records whenever you can, and whilst there
may be occasions when you need to search more widely, once your search has
identified the record sets of most interest try searching them individually.
To search an individual record set choose
A-Z of record sets from the Search records dropdown menu (it's the
last item in the list). Now start typing a word or number that you'd expect to
find in the name of the record set, for example 'Staffordshire', 'Hertfordshire',
'Shropshire', or '1911' - by the time you get to the fourth character you'll
see a list of record sets whose title includes those characters, and at this
point you can select the one you want.
Occasionally the name of the record set may
not be intuitively obvious: for example, there's a very useful collection of
digitised and indexed parish registers which cover East Kent, but since the
Canterbury Collection currently doesn't include Kent in the titles of its
constituent records sets you do need to have some familiarity with the records.
This is one instance in which you might start searching more widely, then focus in on the Canterbury records after they start
showing up on search results.
Using filters to restrict the results
displayed is a great way to make sense of a vast number of search results, but
you need to be aware that this approach won't necessarily find the records
you're looking for (because of the mismatch between the search form and the
fields in the transcribed records). Whilst you'll often end up with the same
results, sometimes you won't - and as family historians we can't afford to miss
records relating to our ancestors.
Very occasionally it's worth starting
your search from a form that has a keyword box (which the forms for individual
record sets usually don't). Keywords will match any part of the transcribed
record, and so can access parts of the record that other searches cannot reach.
For example, if you're having problems finding your ancestor's burial - perhaps
because the surname is such a common one or has been badly mangled by the vicar
or the transcriber - you could try adding a word that might just be in the
record, such as 'widow', 'carpenter', or 'son of john' (but bear in mind that
different record sets have been transcribed in different ways, so this
technique won't always work).
If you want to search (say) Berkshire
Burial Index in this way the dedicated search form doesn't have a keywords
field - instead choose Birth, marriage,
death and parish records from the Search records dropdown menu, then filter for the Berkshire Burial
Index (start typing 'Berkshire' in the Record set box and it will soon pop up
as one of the options.
Tip:
the most important thing to remember is that if you can't find a record you
know to be there, it's time to review your search strategy - and if it keeps
happening you definitely need to change your strategy!
WW1 remembrance
database goes live
The Royal British Legion is working with
the Commonwealth War Graves Commission to keep alive the memory of those who
fell in the First World War. Every
Man Remembered provides an opportunity to commemorate the sacrifice made by
more than 1.1 million men.
You can enter a short message of up to
140 characters, upload up to 5 photos, and add a more detailed story of up to
3500 characters (about a page). It's hard to commemorate someone in a
Twitter-sized message, especially someone you never met, but here's what I
wrote for my great uncle Herbert, who died at Ypres in January 1916:
"Though you were my grandfather's brother he
never spoke of you, not even to my dad.
You were
forgotten then but you are remembered now."
How one man's vision led to
the creation of WWI's War Graves
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission
came about because of one man's vision: too old to fight at 45, Fabian Ware
became the commander of a mobile unit of the British Red Cross and - saddened
by the number of casualties - wanted to find a way to ensure that the final
resting places of those who gave their lives would not be lost forever.
Look as you hard as you like, but you're
unlikely to find the gravestones of those who fell at Waterloo,
or in the Crimea - in 1914 there were only handfuls of surviving British war
graves despite all the conflicts of the preceding centuries. Yet, thanks to the
efforts of Fabian Arthur Goulstone Ware, a
schoolteacher and sometime journalist, by the end of the Great War the graves
of hundreds of thousands of fallen soldiers were commemorated.
By the end of 1914, 16,200 officers and
men were confirmed dead, there graves marked - if at all - with a wooden cross
with a scribbled inscription, often in pencil. How Fabian Ware managed to
change everything is described in Empires
of the Dead: How One Man's Vision Led to the Creation of WWI's War Graves
by David Crane, which I'm currently reading on my Kindle (it's also available
as a hardback or paperback).
Lives of the First World
War: update
I've written before about this website,
which is a partnership between the Imperial War Museum and DC Thomson Family
History. However there's been a big change since I last wrote: you can now
claim a free subscription (normal price £6 a month or £50 a year) if you have
an active paid annual subscription to findmypast.co.uk; when your email invitation
arrives it will include a special code. I received my invitation on 1st July, but
I'm not sure what the schedule is for sending out invitations to newer subscribers.
Of course, much of the site is free, but
if you are thinking of subscribing,
it's worth pointing out that until Thursday you can buy a findmypast
subscription for less - even though it includes hundreds of millions of
additional records.
Did your WW1 hero wear a
helmet?
As the centenary of the outbreak of
World War 1 is fast approaching (or has just passed, if you are Serbian) I'm particular
fortunate that my brother works for the Imperial War Museum. When we met up
recently at a family gathering he asked me what seemed like an easy question:
"What did British soldiers wear on their heads in World War 1?"
The obvious answer is helmets, because
virtually all of the photographs I've seen show soldiers wearing steel helmets
- often known as Brodie
helmets after their inventor. But in fact the headgear they started out
with provided virtually no protection - they wore cloth caps - and it was the
French who first started experimenting with protective metal helmets.
In October 1915 questions were asked in
Parliament about the issue of helmets to British soldiers, one of them
referring to "those which are reported to have been found useful in
protecting the French Army from rifle and shrapnel fire". You can see from
this Hansard report
that it was very early days, and a week later it was announced that "some
thousands of helmets have already been issued", which suggests that only a
small percentage of soldiers had been issued with them.
However, by early 1916 250,000 helmets
had been issued - although ironically the number of head injuries recorded went
up, because some of the soldiers who would previously been killed instantly
were now surviving long enough to be treated.
I wonder if my great uncle was wearing a
helmet when he was killed in January 1916?
Many of you will have heard of The Wipers Times, the first issue of
which was published at Ypres just three weeks after my great-uncle joined the
ranks of the fallen in one of many battles that took place around this small
Belgian town.
Masterminded by Captain F J Roberts of
the 12th Battalion Sherwood Foresters, The
Wipers Times did a lot to boost morale at a difficult time.
Just 100 copies of Issue 1 were printed, and only 200 copies of Issue 2 so I was amazed to discover
that in 2 weeks my local - but world-renowned - auction house Sworders will be auctioning a collection of Great War
satirical newspapers which includes copies of Issue 1, Issue 2, Issue 3 and
Issue 4 of The Wipers Times.
Other front line newspapers in the
collection include The New Church Times,
The Kemmel
Times, The Somme Times, and The B.E.F. Times - in all there are 15
issues out of the 23 that were printed. All of these newspapers - other than but
the first two issues of The Wipers Times
- were printed on the same press, which was moved along the Western Front.
If, like me, you don't have £1500 to
spare - there's always the 2013 facsimile
edition, available on Amazon for just £6.99 in hardback (the Kindle version
is even cheaper).
Last chance to save 20%
on photo restoration ENDS
TUESDAY
There's been a very good response to the
offer I announced in my last newsletter, but I'm delighted to say that despite
the flood of interest from LostCousins members Repixl are still aiming to
turn around your photographs in 48 hours or less. This means that if you
haven't yet tried them out, you can send off a couple of photos now, and still
have time to submit another order before the 20% discount ends on Tuesday 5th
August.
Whether your old photos are creased,
marked, faded, torn, or have missing corners Repixl can make them as good
as new. And if you have more recent photos that just didn't come out as well as
you'd like, they can make them better than new!
To claim your exclusive discount go to
your online shopping basket and type the code LOSTCOUSINS into the box - the prices will adjust to show the
discount (and, provided you use one of the links above, LostCousins will also
benefit).
Tip:
your valuable prints won't leave your sight - simply scan them in (at the
highest resolution your scanner supports) and upload them.
British Newspaper Archive
adds 1 million pages
Since the beginning of the year, the British
Newspaper Archive has added over 1 million pages, taking the total to 8.4
million. I know many readers took advantage of the £1 for 1 month subscription
offer (I certainly did) but it's worth reminding you that the newspapers are
also available through findmypast.
A 12 month subscription to the BNA would
cost £79.95, which is good value for what's on offer - but when you can access
most of the articles as part of a findmypast subscription costing under £50
it's certainly tempting to take the cheaper route, even though the BNA search
is more powerful.
Jane wrote to me recently to point out
nearly a third of the entries on one page from the burial register of St
Nicholas, Liverpool hadn't been transcribed by Ancestry - and when I looked at
the page before and the page after it was clear that this wasn't a one-off, and
in fact all the pages I checked from 1806 showed the same problem.
I only checked one page in 1805 and
1807, but they too showed the same problem - so my guess is that as many as
one-third of the entries could be missing over a number of years.
Prior to 1813 when pre-printed registers
were introduced there is a lot of variation in the way that different vicars
wrote out entries, so it's not surprising that transcribers sometimes get it
wrong. As someone who knows how difficult it is to transcribe other peoples'
handwriting I don't blame transcribers for making mistakes, but neither
Ancestry nor findmypast provides a simple way of reporting systematic errors of
this nature - and that's something they both need to think about..
Thanks to everyone who has entered this
competition - I know from reading your emails that you've found it to be a very
useful process - and over the next couple of months I'm going to be sharing
some of the best entries with members, starting with Gail's wonderful letter to
her father:
Dear Father,
There are so many things I want like to say to you
that I didn’t say when I had the chance. Of course, there are the obvious
things we all want to say one more time to our loved ones who have passed on, like
I love you and I wish you could have stayed longer. And thank you for the life
and values you gave to me, for your hard work in providing for Mom and us
children, and for the fun times you gave us too.
However, what I really want to express here is my most
sincere apology. I am so sorry that, in my self-centeredness of youth, I did
not get to know you better. I never asked the questions I should have asked
about your early life, your “life-before-me”. Knowing
only little snippets, I never realized until recently how difficult your life
had been. Only after much searching, did I come to know that you had been sent
away from the family you knew and loved at the tender age of 12, on a big ship,
across an expansive ocean, to live 
in a foreign
country with a vastly different climate and to live with strangers. It was
almost 20 years after you passed on that I learned you were one of
approximately 100,000 British Home Children. You left the big city of London,
sailing alone in steerage (with only a purser to watch over you and the
orphanage’s director in first class to escort you) on a steamship to a tiny
town in rural New Brunswick, Canada. You were taken in by a childless couple to
help work on the farm. I know you had to have been a small boy for your age, being
described in your records as a delicate looking boy, deaf from adenoids, and
because, though stout and physically strong, at 5’ 3½”, you never grew to be a
very large man.
I also know that you saw much death in your early
life. Your mother died when you were scarcely two; your step-mother died when
you were nine; your paternal grandmother (who possibly helped to care for you
when you had no mother) died when you were 11. Even your
Canadian “foster mother” died a few years after you came to live in her home.
There are also many questions I want to ask you. What
do you remember of life in London? What was the ocean trip like? Were you sick?
Were you scared, or was it an exciting adventure? Was your foster family kind
to you, or did they treat you cruelly and work you hard? Were you ever again in
contact with your father in England?
There are also things I want to tell you, like how
much I admire and think fondly of your amazing sense of humor. Surely it was
the coping mechanism that got you through the hard times. I always remember and
often repeat your famous jokes and one-liners! I also want to tell you about
some of the things I discovered researching our family history. Your
great-great-grandfather was a well-known ship-builder. He built some of the
first steamships to ply the waters of the Thames. In 1824, he went on to be
co-founder of a major shipping company in London, the General Steam Navigation
Company, which continued to operate until 1966. As a sometimes maligned British
Home Child, I know you would have liked to have known about your proud
heritage!
Your
loving daughter,
Gail
I hope you found Gail's letter as
uplifting as I did - thank you so much, Gail, for sharing it with us. I'd also
like to thank Grant Kelly, of Vintage Photo and Frame Limited for giving
permission to reproduce that photograph, which has been cropped from a larger
photo of children at the Elinor Close Farm c1910.
You can find out more about Home
Children, and Gail's quest for knowledge in a 2005 article from Ancestry magazine which is reproduced here
on the British Home Children in Canada
website.
Did your ancestor work
for Guinness?
Guinness in Dublin hold records for
around 20,000 workers who were employed in their Dublin brewery between the
1880s and the early 2000s. You can submit a search request here (many
thanks to Colm, who was in Dublin recently, for this tip).
Ancestry.com offer
free DNA tests to new US subscribers
Ancestry.com are offering free DNA tests
(normally priced at $99) when you click here and take out a 6
month US Subscription that costs $99.
The DNA test is ONLY available to subscribers
who live in the US, and the subscription only offers access to US records - so
it probably won't be of interest to most readers of this newsletter, since you
all have connections with the British Isles.
But many of us have friends or relatives
in the US, so I thought I'd mention it anyway!
Note:
the test is similar to the Family Finder test offered by Family
Tree DNA - if you're technically-minded you'll find a comparison chart here.
Although Ancestry have a much larger base of users,
because they only offer the test to customers in the US the chance of making connections
in Europe is probably smaller.
If you've been reading what I've said
about Zopa, the
peer-to-peer lending company, over the past couple of years - but have been
waiting for the perfect opportunity to come along, now could be the time!
That's because after my discussion with Giles Andrews, the founder, they've
decided to introduce a very generous offer: if I refer you, and you subsequently
invest £2000 or more, we'll EACH get £50 added to our account (that's 2.5% of
your investment, on top of the generous annual interest of between 4% and 5.2%).
In truth I don't know that I made any
difference - they were probably planning it already - but since it happens to
be exactly what I suggested I'm going to claim the credit anyway! However you
must click the link in the previous paragraph, otherwise we'll both lose out.
Note:
I'm not a financial adviser, nor do I have any ambition to become one, so this
is just a friendly word of advice. Do make sure you read all the information,
as I did when I stated investing in 2012 - and don't blame me in the unlikely
event that it goes wrong (I'll probably lose a lot more than you anyway).
Long ago a LostCousins member recommended
e-Rewards to me, and I've been using
them ever since (whoever you were, thank you!). It's an online survey company
which pays in points that can be converted into Avios
(the new name for Air Miles), and I find that it's a great way to keep my Avios account alive and gently increasing.
Many of the best tips in this newsletter
come from members - indeed it was a LostCousins member who recommended the free
Irfanview graphics editor that I write
about so often, and which saves me a fortune in ink that would otherwise be
wasted.
The latest tip I've received (from
Christine) is for a service called Zinio, which her
local library offers (and so does mine). It provides over 100 magazines in a
digital format so that you can read them anywhere - and best of all, it's completely
free to library users.
I'm sure there must be some catch - because
there are two weeklies and one monthly that I currently subscribe to, so Zinio has the potential to save me a lot of money - but I
certainly can't figure out what it is. Why not check whether your library
offers Zinio?
Good news - the Government has accepted the recommendation of the
Office for National Statistics that the 2021 Census should not be scrapped. See the
next newsletter for more details.
Thanks for taking the time to read my
newsletter - I hope you find it useful.
Peter Calver
Founder, LostCousins
© Copyright 2014 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 this newsletter to copy the link. But why not
invite them to join instead?